Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 9
(1529–1535.)
THE SORBONNE.
No less at Fontainebleau than at Nérac, Queen Margaret was the patron of the Renaissance, and the champion of the learned. She fostered the natural love of Francis for art and letters, and encouraged him (to defy the restrictions and rigid dogma of the Sorbonne. Francis, who was sensitive to any interference with his kingship, was easily convinced that the Sorbonne lessened his authority by its presumption; and in such a mood his sister found it easy to persuade him to found a secular college in Paris, to confer an eternal benefit on Learning.
Margaret was not alone in her endeavour. Jean du Bellay, the younger brother of the vigilant Guillaume and the wise Martin, was Cardinal of Paris. He was suspected of a leaning to Reform; it was even said that, spite of his red hat, he was secretly married to Madame de Châtillon, the excellent governess of Margaret. He was a brilliant, adequate, and tolerant statesman and scholar. His influence, it is needless to say, with that of his two brothers, was ever thrown into Margaret's scale. The Renaissance in France had no more energetic champions than the three Du Bellays.
Guillaume Budé, the great Greek scholar, who, on his wedding-day lamented that he had but six hours left for study, was the librarian of Francis. Pedant as he was, narrow and dogmatic humanist, he was none the less devoted to the cause of learning. He did good work in the revival of Letters. Among other scholars, says a contemporary, Budé shone as the sun among the stars. To him, to Jean du Bellay, to the Queen of Navarre, Michelet gives the triune glory of founding the College of France. This is a little hard on Francis, who already in 1521 was inspired with this idea; it is, however, safe to say that to these three persons belongs the honour of infusing into the volatile king, sufficient energy and hardihood to make so fine a thought a deed.
Margaret, Cardinal du Bellay, Budé, these were undoubtedly the guides and inspirers of Francis. But there was a whole public seconding them, demanding their succour, crying for safety and legality. Paris was full of men of learning, even as Fontainebleau of architects and painters. Étienne Poncher, Bishop of Paris, Loys de Ruzé, a president of Parliament, were the leaders of a circle abounding in wisdom and enterprise. The Estiennes, the learned printers whose wives and children could all speak Latin, to whom is due the New Testament of Lefêbvre d'Étaples, the first book of the Reformation, these men, workmen and scholars at once, learned, heroic in their patience and labour, had gathered about them a society of humanists and debtors, to whom they submitted the texts issued by their press. Lascaris the Greek, Oronce Finée the mathematician, Rhenanus, the historian of Germany, Alexander Rauconet, Musurus, Paul Paradis, Vatable, Toussaint, Danès, scholars and philologists, these men, who did for France what Pico and Politian did for Italy, gathered, as round a sanctuary altar, round this printing-press of the Estiennes. Through them, no less than through the humane Margaret, the brilliant Cardinal du Bellay, the profound Budé, it was rendered possible for Francis to found the College of France.
The university was no shelter to men such as these. "Græcum est, non legitur," taught the Sorbonne; "Cette langue enfante toutes les hérésies," preached the monks; and if Greek, the tongue of pagans, were forbidden, yet more intolerable was Hebrew, the language of the Jews. To shut France close within the narrow fold of Rome, ignorant of any tongue but her own, dreaming of no glory and no ideal but the supremacy of the Church; this was the aim of the Sorbonne. But the aim of the King was to throw wide every gate and break down every barrier, to open the East and welcome the learning of the Arab and the prowess of the Turk; to ransack the past for the guidance of the present; to establish a France which should face the glories of Greece and Rome and not be abashed: a France of palaces, peopled with artists and scholars, splendid in battle, yet more redoubtable in her invincible peace; a Catholic France, which, holding one hand to Soliman, the other to the heretic North, should reconcile humanity.
For eight years the King, a true Valois, audacious in conceiving, slow in the act, had revolved in his mind this glorious idea. In 1529, urged by Margaret and the scholars of her court, he gave it the first germlike shape. No sooner was it founded, than far and wide through Europe spread the fame of the brilliant secular College of France. Year by year, as its fame and its students increased, chairs and endowments were added to the first poor foundation. In 1529, the College begins with a professor of Greek and one of Hebrew: that is all. By 1530, two chairs for Greek, two for Hebrew, one for mathematics. In 1534, Latin follows; medicine and philosophy in 1540; these are quickly succeeded by endowments for jurisprudence, for Arabic and Syriac. Physiology, the rights of man, the East—these are the doors opened by the new secular college. In these twelve years the destiny of the genius of France is decided, the character of France has shown its bent.
To this impulse the Sorbonne opposed itself with violence and fury. "If we may believe our masters," says the contemporary Histoire Ecclesiastique, "to study Greek and to meddle, let it he never so little, with Hebrew, is one of the greatest heresies of the world." And Henri Estienne, in his apology for Herodotus, complains that Greek and even Latin are esteemed "luthéranifiques et hérétifiques." To such an extent, he adds, that Master Béda, in the presence of King Francis, first of the name, retorted to the late Guillaume Budé that Hebrew and Greek would be the source of many heresies. In this way learning and science were tabooed as Lutheran. It is necessary to insist upon this point in order to understand the ferocity of the Sorbonne; in order to appreciate the motive which, for the moment, fused the Renaissance with the Reformation. These humanists and pioneers, for the most part Jewish or foreign of origin, professed the Reformed faith as an excuse for lax Catholicism. On the other hand, the most earnest souls in France looked to the New Ideas as an escape from the degrading laxities, the soulless unmeaning of sixteenth-century religion. They hoped for purification and reform in the Church itself; while the Patriots desired to see the restriction of the temporal power of Rome; both wished to decentralize the Church, to restore the Gallican branch to its old national position. All these different strains of dissent were, firmly welded into one by the ignorant persecution of the Sorbonne. But this movement was not yet Protestant; it was still very practical, very undefined; little concerned with theories or ideas. "Thank heaven," cries Margaret, "we are none of us Sacramentarians!" To establish secular education, print the Bible in French, teach Greek and Mathematics, sustain the Gallican branch, this is the programme of the movement; this, and no actual schism. Briçonnet, Roussel, the Du Bellays, Margaret, did not desire or dream of a Church wholly severed from the Catholic authority. It was a sort of Home Rule which they demanded: to be Catholics, but reformed and Gallican Catholics. It was in truth Calvin the Frenchman, Calvin the man of system and practice, and not Luther the German, the mystic and prophet, who organized and consolidated the Protestant Church.
This point must never be forgotten in seeking to understand the history of Margaret of Angoulême. That life, else so hopelessly confused, so vacillating and effortless, becomes clear and definite when once we understand that not the Reformation but the Renaissance inspired it. Never was a spirit less dogmatic or insistent than hers. She was no martyr, no saint or prophetess. She was merely a woman filled by the new fervour for learning, the new reverence for knowledge; the renascent love for art and poetry, no less than for ideas and for science. Under one wing she shelters Janet, Cellini, Marot, Desperriers; under the other, Calvin and Vatable. Full of imagination and keen intelligence, instinct with compassion and liberality, her nature would have been as much revolted by narrow Protestant dogma as by Catholic tyranny. Read the contemporary Lutheran historians, and it is clear that the ignorance and brutal injustice were not entirely upon the side of the Sorbonne. Coarseness and violence were as rife at Geneva as at Paris, and Margaret would not have been happy in Calvin's City of God. She would have pitied Servetus as sorely as she pitied Loys de Berquin. Her rare and modern spirit would ill have understood that hard-and-fast salvation of Geneva, that satisfaction in the damnation of disbelievers. Human life, knowledge, tolerance and freedom, were dearer to her than any code or any creed. In fact, her code and her creed was her belief in these things; her practice of human kindness. Those dying words of hers, so hushed-up, so indignantly refuted, express the principle of her life: "What I have done I did from compassion, not conviction."
At this moment, let us remember, Calvin is still in France, a youth of twenty; his Institutio is not written, Geneva is not yet a Church, Protestantism still is undetermined. Margaret and her court of scholars personify the earlier, vaguer Reformation. Mystical and learned, eager to discover the secrets of heaven and earth, they were more anxious to learn than to proselytize; and the College of France is the Church that they established.
It is important to insist on this eclectic and cultured moment of the Reformation, because Margaret never outgrew it; and was condemned as an apostate by the later Protestants, who had advanced, merely for standing still. On the other hand, exasperated by the growth of heresy, the Court receded from its tolerant position. So that Margaret, who at this moment touches Calvin, as it were, on one hand, and the Court on the other, is gradually left at equal distance from either, suspected on both sides of half-heartedness and heresy.
This is indeed the climax of her influence, the most brilliant moment of her career. From among her servants and her masters are sought the staff of the College of France. Toussaint and Danès had taught her a little Greek; it is said that Paul Paradis had given her lessons in Hebrew. Henri Estienne was under her protection, no less than Vatable, Lascaris, and Aleander. Marot, the Lutheran poet, her valet-de-chambre, is entrusted to rewrite in modern French the ancient masterpieces of the quickly-growing language. She is the centre of the movement; the King himself is under her influence. The Sorbonne, made keen by hate and fear, raises its threatening head, observes, and considers how to strike.
To strike was only self-preservation, so bold and rapid became the impulse towards reform. In December 1530, the Protestant princes of Germany entered into a league, and signed the Treaty of Smalcald. England was on the point of actual revolt from the Roman sway, and France seemed like to do as much. The Emperor no less than the Sorbonne dreaded lest Francis should join the Protestant league. For the new ideas received every encouragement in Paris, and in September 1531 it seemed as if the last, check were removed with the death of Louisa of Savoy. While she had lived, the Catholic party had trusted to her influence on her son and daughter, who passionately loved her; but now the innovating Margaret, unrestrained by her mother, would sit, sole in influence, at the right hand of the King.
For an end had come to the passionate life of Madame. Her genius for intrigue, her scheming avarice, her intense and active nature, lay idle in the grave. She was loth to quit the stage on which she played so principal a part; all her sufferings had not reconciled her to the thought of rest. Constantly ill, never free from gout and colic, she was still resolved to act, to witness. But throughout the summer of 1531, Margaret's letters reveal to us the gradual wasting of the frame which contains this violent spirit. "She is not yet so strong as I desire." "Madame was yesterday so weak, I feared she would have fainted." "She is so variable." Margaret says no more than that in her fear to alarm her brother. But though she refrains from afflicting him more openly, she writes of nothing but her mother's health. Today she is better, she had a good night, she will certainly recover; yet, ah! sometimes she seems so weak! Turning from the fierce history of those times, in which Margaret's gentle name, like a wing-bound dove, is bandied as a missile from one party to another, there is nothing more pathetic than to open the volume of her letters, to read these lines breathing love and anxiety, from which all else is banished, all hint of speculation, all interest in great affairs, to perceive this Lutheran heretic, hushed, self-unconscious, gentle, sitting by the bedside of the Catholic mother she adores, and gazing with anguish into the paling, dying face.
The death of Louisa gave a swift impetus to the movement of reform.
In 1533, Robert Estienne printed his Latin Bible. In the same year, a cooper's son from Noyon, a certain young Chauvin (or Calvinus, as he latinized the name), a Picard bourgeois, strong, hard, dogmatic, litigious, had composed a book, as yet only known in manuscript, the Institutio Christianæ Religionis. It was audaciously dedicated to the King, and bore the motto: Non veni mittere pacem, sed gladium. The Rector of the Sorbonne preached a sermon by this young Calvin to his scandalised magisters. What! was the heresy infesting their very stronghold? The imprudent Rector had to fly for his life to Switzerland. A warrant was issued against him: another against the obnoxious Calvin, who, less agile, was run to earth at Angoulême. Now let the Lutherans and Zwinglians behold to what ends led their monstrous opinions! Parliament, Sorbonne, all good Catholics, prepared for the auto and the triumph—when, at the last moment, their prey was wrested from them: Margaret, the pernicious Queen of Navarre, threw herself down before the King and entreated his pardon for Calvin. It was granted.
She was verily the head and front of the offending, this light-minded, mystical, learned young Queen of Navarre. At all costs, she must be warned, crushed, superseded. A little before this she had published at Alençon a poem, weak, mystical, inflated with a vague ideality: Le Myrouer de l'Âme Pecheresse. It would be hard, in this mist of nebulous piety, to name precisely any error of commission. But the Sorbonne, supremely irritated against Margaret, discovered therein divers heresies of omission. There was no mention of the Saints in it, neither of Purgatory; the prayer to the Virgin, the Salve Regina, was paraphrased in honour of Jesus Christ. Here the prompt and aggressive Béda perceived his opportunity. In the next Index of the works forbidden to the faithful, the Sorbonne published the title of the Myrouer de l'Âme Pecheresse.
All this took place in 1533. Francis, ever devoted to his sister, still devoted to the cause of progress and tolerance, ruminating an alliance with Soliman and the Protestant League, was thunderstruck with indignation. He sent for the Rector of the Sorbonne and ordered a complete list to be made of those magisters who had composed the Index. He caused the Bishop of Senlis to defend the work before the University, which meekly retracted its accusation. The occasion was made into a triumph for Margaret.
Béda and his party were not silenced yet. A few weeks after this the students and four professors of the theological college of the Navarrene Fathers at Paris publicly performed a farce in the great hall of the building. Margaret was the heroine of this ingenious representation. In the first act she is represented as leaving her spindle and letting fall her distaff, to accept from an Infernal Fury a French translation of the four gospels; Margaret then becomes herself a Fury, a spirit of controversy and bitterness, devoured by insensate tyranny, infected with the cruelty of Hell. Such was the movement of the play; such the portrait of the endearing and sweet-hearted sister of the King. Francis was terribly incensed. He sent the four Navarrene Fathers to the prison of the Conciergerie, whence only at Margaret's most earnest intercession they were, after some days, set free. Béda suffered at greater length. Suspicious, either that the farce as performed at his instigation, or else that he was actually the author of it, the King sentenced the combative syndic to two years of exile.
The Sorbonne was in despair. It did, indeed, appear impossible to assail this high-throned heretic; moreover, the exile of Béda struck their weapon from their hands. For a while all was quiet. Then an event occurred to set the Protestants hopelessly in the wrong. Whether laid in train by the coarser and more blundering Reformers, or the fruit of unscrupulous Catholic zeal, none may decide.
During the night of the 18th October 1534, the doors of the cathedral and town halls of Paris, Rouen, Meaux, and other cities, even to the gates of the castle of Amboise where was the King, were covered with placards, assailing in the grossest terms the mysteries of the Catholic faith, denying the Mass, the Host, the prayers for the dead: whatever was held most mystical and sacred. Nothing could be more brutal than the feeling which prompted this offence, unless it be the feeling which punished it. All that was tender and holy was publicly outraged here; the mysterious sacrifice of the Mass, the faith that rescued the dear but sinful dead from the pains of Purgatory. More than this. In Paris there stood an image of the Mother and Child, held especially venerable and beloved. Many prayers were addressed to this succourable Madonna; her image in the public street brought to the roughest heart a reminder of gentleness and purity. This dawn of the 19th October shone upon a desecrated shrine. The head of the Virgin, the head of the Babe, had been rudely chopped from the trunks, and lay, fallen and mutilated, in the gutter. When the King heard of it, he burst into tears. That cruel blunder, that heartless revenge, lost the cause of the Reform. Many a stake should smoke, and many a rack should strain and creek, in expiation for that murdered stone.
This affair of the placards sent a horror pulsing throughout the length and breadth of France. It frightened from the Reform its gentler and more reverent adherents. Margaret herself, ever compassionate, felt it necessary to declare her Catholicism to the world. Francis henceforth became no less combative than the Sorbonne itself. He set out at once for Paris to sift the matter. No sooner had he reached the capital than in the space of a single night the placards burst out again in hideous flower. They were on all the buildings, all the churches. Even into the King's cabinet they brought their obscene and scurrilous defiance. A vague fear and horror took possession of the town. All through France throbbed that sense of outraged pity for the murdered Redeemer which lay at the bottom of mediæval persecution, blent with that maddening terror of Supernatural Evil, which gave their keenest edge to the cruelties that punished witchcraft. Heresy was, indeed, a sort of witchcraft, a spell wasting the souls of men before the fires of Hell, even as the grosser witches knew how to make men's bodies melt and wane. It is difficult now to place ourselves in this attitude; yet, unless we do so, we can never understand the lesson of the past.
When the King heard of the Virgin's mutilated image, he burst, as I have said, into tears. But his anger was not to end in weeping. A severe inquiry was instituted, and all accused of complicity in this matter were brought to Paris and tried there. The party of the Sorbonne pretended that they had discovered a Protestant plot to murder all good Catholics while at Mass. Nothing can be less founded than such a charge, obviously trumped up to secure a conviction. Without it the conviction was secure. Twenty-four of the accused were sentenced to be burnt to death.
On the 29th January 1535, a great expiatory procession traversed Paris from the Louvre to the Church of Nôtre Dame. The King walked in this procession, bare-headed, holding in his hand a lighted torch. He was followed by his children and the flower of his court. His beautiful mistress was there, with Queen Leonor and many fair and joyous ladies; but Margaret had returned to Navarre. She had left Paris, heavy-hearted, some weeks before, seeing, as it seemed, all her dreams of wide culture, beneficence, and toleration crumble suddenly into nothing, and the old reign of Darkness engulf the world once more. Indeed, on that morning of the 21st January 1535, the Renaissance, the College of France, the treaty with the Turks, appeared shocking and anomalous; for Paris had returned to mediævalism. It might have been Louis XI. and not King Francis who walked there bare-headed, holding his lighted torch. To the sound of solemn chants, the procession wound through the streets. Not only the court was there, and the King and Queen, and the two hundred gentlemen of the royal household, but the whole Sorbonne (triumphant over the absent Queen of Navarre), the Clergy of Paris, the Swiss Guards, the Heralds, the Court of Parliament, the Municipality, the Guilds of Capital, the Courts of the Realm. It was a procession of several thousand persons, all alike in their pity and their burning indignation, that marched from the Louvre to Nôtre Dame. When we realise this, we understand the sequel; we understand how little yet, for all its brilliant veneer of culture, France was impregnate with the true modern spirit. The Middle Ages were reared up close behind, and their tremendous shadows fell across that world to darken it.
At Nôtre Dame there was High Mass; thence the procession moved to the Bishop's palace, where, seated on a throne, the King addressed the multitude. In his words, burning, thrilling with mediæval passion, we catch no echo of the familiar speech of the Father of Letters. The debonnair, free-thinking dilettante of the Renaissance has disappeared; the mutilated image of the Virgin has roused in his place the latent fanatic, present ever behind the most modern shows of the double-natured sixteenth century. Louis the Saint or Louis the Cruel might have spoken as he spoke. So easily a strong passion refutes the painful progress of centuries.
The multitude stood in the hall and in the court outside; the King on his raised throne spoke to them, the tears in his eyes. He spoke of the blasphemy and profanation, and of that day's expiation. He denounced the enemies of God and the Church. "And if my own right arm," he cried at last, "were infected with this heretic pestilence, I would cut it off and cast it from me; and if one of my own children were so miserable as to favour it, I would with my own hand sacrifice him to God's justice and my own."
Ominous words for the absent and suspected Queen of Navarre. The Sorbonne, listening, must have triumphed; for those wise magisters did not yet know how volatile were the moods of their brilliant King. For the moment there was no more fiery Catholic than Francis. He went himself, with the ladies of his court, with the fervent outraged Leonor and the laughing Madame d'Étampes, to see them light the pile where six of the accused should suffer that evening. Throughout December the Autos had flamed and smoked; already ten Lutherans had died that winter at the stake. In general they suffered singly; but to honour so tremendous an occasion, no less than six could die.
"Three Lutherans," says the Bourgeois of Paris, "and a clerk of the Châtelet, and a fruiterer, and the wife of a cobbler and a schoolmaster; this last for eating meat on Fridays." These were to be the victims. They were fastened by long iron chains to a lofty gibbet, and swung to and fro in and out of the burning fire. Madame d'Étampes is said to have complained of the sickening odour of the burning flesh; of the horrible sight of the convulsed and blackened bodies. Poor, easy-natured Anne de Pisseleu, yourself suspected of Lutheran leanings, the spectacle may well have turned you faint with fear and horror! But the Bourgeois of Paris does not mention the presence of the King at the actual sacrifice. The Court, I incline to believe, turned home before it came to that.
Throughout the spring the stakes are constantly piled, the gibbets swing their smoking freight to and fro. And, whereas in the earlier months the victims were humble and ignorant folk, as time goes on we note a richer prey. In November "a cobbler's son," "a printer," "a mason," "a tailor," "a young servant": in such wise run the entries. But in the spring: "a rich merchant, from fifty to sixty years of age, estimé homme de bien," "a goldsmith," "a painter," "a young Italian merchant," "a scholar," "one of the King's choristers," "an attorney." Here it is the middle-class that is attacked.
Nor was this all. Not only life but reason was menaced. On the 26th February the King suspended the action of the Press. No more books were to be printed. So ordained the friend and patron of the Estiennes, the Founder of the College of France. But the thing was impossible; France could no longer live, work, pursue her daily affairs, without the Press. Not only Jean du Bellay and the learned Budé, but even the reactionary Parliament protested against so grotesque a prohibition. The King was content with imposing a censorship of the Press.
So completely had Francis turned upon his steps. Perhaps we find the reason in the fact that Béda, the intrepid Béda, returned from exile in 1535, accused the King himself of leaning towards heresy. Francis threw the rash syndic into prison again; obliged him to do public penance, in a sheet and holding a candle; finally confined him in the prison of Mont St. Michel, where the cutting winds and stormy weather of the ensuing spring cooled for ever the very heart of Béda. But Francis, though avenged, was not appeased. A horror of his own laxity was upon him. Still the persecution continued; till finally the Protestants of Germany complained of his rigour towards unfortunates whose only crime was professing the religion which they themselves, the King's allies, believed. They also deplored the rumoured alliance between Francis and Soliman. The King's answer has been preserved. He, to some extent, admits a friendly intention towards the Porte, acknowledging that he had received the Turkish Ambassador. The Emperor, he reminds them, had done as much; and it is well to abstain from war with the Turk. As for the penalties he had, against his will and nature, inflicted on his Lutheran subjects, it was rather their sedition than their religion which he had punished. So little objection had the King to the convictions of his allies, that he would willingly receive any theologian that they might choose to send to his court.
This is in the summer of 1535. Another wind blows, and the weather-cock King has veered from his pathos and horror of January. On the eve of a new war with the Emperor, Francis desires to conciliate the German princes. His keen and subtle political instinct recalls him from the dreary paths of Spain.