period (says Beza, Calvin’s biographer) the Reformers had 2000 congregations in France, and 400,000 worshippers.
The above details show how a Protestant faith got some visible footing in France.
Through the memory of the Vaudois, as well as the instructions of a few gifted pastors, men could understand the main errors of the Romish system, especially in its debarring the people from the reading of the Scriptures, and in exalting ceremonies above moral conduct. And any suspension of the fear of persecution was likely to change such inward notions into public inquiry and attendance upon the preaching of religious reformers.
People who stigmatize the Reformers as rebels, on account of their occasional armed resistance to persecution, should remember that if assassins come upon us, though they be the emissaries of what is called government, no scriptural principle of loyal subjection compels us to give them our lives; and if we save or sell our lives dear, we break no law. And laws that connive at, or virtually encourage and suggest, the molestation of quiet citizens on the roadside, are laws only in name, and can be enforced not by right, but by might alone. Up to 1561, such was the molestation to which French Protestants were exposed.
In 1561 the Protestants obtained a breathing time, through the influence of a great General and Statesman, the Grand Admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, born in 1516, and a convert to “the religion” in 1557. The notorious queenmother, Catherine de Medicis, widow of Henry II., continued Regent during the minority of Charles IX. However rejoiced she might otherwise have been at the recantation of Antoine de Bourbon, she resented it as an effect of the influence of the Guises, whose party it strengthened. To counteract the political derangements which she feared, Catherine encouraged Coligny, in 1561 , to promote measures for the toleration of the Reformed.
And now the Protestants were for the first time protected from personal molestation. And it was arranged that their assembling to hear preachings was not to be a ground for legal accusations. Such was the Edict of January 1562. For the civil war, which the infractions of this edict produced, the law-breakers are responsible, namely, the Roman Catholics. The leader of the Protestants was Antoine Bourbon’s brother, the Prince of Conde. During the lull after the auspicious January, and under the protection of the edict, he had made a public profession of the Protestant religion. After his example, many persons of rank had done the same; and the number of persons who came to the Faubourgs of Paris to hear the preaching had in a short time amounted to fifty thousand.
In the summer of 1562 the Queen of Navarre found that she could aid her own Protestant subjects only by arming them for self-defence. But becoming a widow in October of that year, she, in 1563, established Protestantism in Navarre. From the Papal citation, which followed that step, the French Court sheltered her for political reasons. In order, however, to retain the custody of her son and daughter, she fled with them in 1568, and took refuge within the fortifications of La Rochelle, from whence she would not remove till September 1571. The same city of refuge was the sanctuary of many other leading Protestants. The pacification of August 1570 was hastened by this circumstance. It was the beginning of those blandishments from the Court towards the Huguenots, which ended in the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s day, 1572, in Paris. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew spread through France; and in it Coligny was the chief victim among 70,000 slain.
In order to understand the justification of civil war in France at this period, we must consider some points of difference from our views of law and loyalty, belonging to the very constitutions of ancient government as compared with more modern monarchy and executive authority. After considering that the Bartholomew massacre made personal self-defence a Huguenot’s only protection, the reader must picture a French Protestant congregation, forbidden to carry any arms, yet surrounded by Roman Catholics, armed with weapons which a raging priesthood stirs them up to use against the unarmed worshippers, the law not visiting such murderous assaults with any punishment. It must also be realised that it was consistent with loyalty for a noble to have a fortress over which the king had no active jurisdiction, and for a town such as La Rochelle to be equally independent of the sovereign. Such a town, by feudal right, was as effectual a sanctuary against the king’s emissaries as any ecclesiastical building. It was as lawless for the king to go to war with the town, as for the town to send an invading army against Paris. The independent rulers of a fort or walled town had some duties to their own dependents, to which even the king’s claims must be postponed. The supreme authority of a king over all towns and castles was a state of things which in theory the King of France
