Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 1.djvu/21

 a bad colour to their designs. Such a malcontent made advances to them in 1615 — viz., the Prince of Conde, who induced the justly-honoured Protestant Henri, Due de Rohan, to take the field. But their greatest and best counsellor, the sainted Du Plessis Mornay, entreated his fellow-Protestants to keep back. He said, “The Court will set on foot a negotiation, which will be carried on till the Prince has gained his own ends, when he will leave our churches in the lurch and saddled with all the odium.” Such actually was the result. (“Histoire des Protestants,” par De Felice, p. 294, 2de edit.) Pierre du Moulin, the staunch Protestant champion, was opposed to the civil war. (See Bates’ Vitae.) From a letter dated Paris, Feb. 1617, written to our far-famed Camden by M. F. Limiers, we may formulate the dictum, “Arma Protestantium meliora sunt preces et vota.” If the fall of La Rochelle and the other cautionary towns has been ascribed to the lukewarmness of the Huguenots themselves, it may, with at least equal reason, be inferred that there was a principle in their inaction. To exchange the appearance of feudal defiance for statutory subjection to their king was a lawful suggestion and experiment. Accordingly, not only did the majority of the Protestants stay at home, but many of them served in the royal armies. And after the pacification of 1629, when Louis XIII. enacted the Edict of Nismes, they rested all their hopes of religious liberty upon that monarch’s satisfaction with their complete subjection to royal jurisdiction, and with the very strong loyalty of their principles and manifestoes. During the minority of Louis XIV., their fidelity and good services were acknowledged by the Premier of France, Cardinal Mazarin, under whose administration they enjoyed much tranquillity, and by whose recommendation they filled many important offices in the financial department of his Majesty’s Government.

Any right or privilege rendering the Edict of Nantes theoretically dangerous, as inconsistent with regal domination, had no being after 1629. The monarch who carried out the great and terrible persecution of the seventeenth century had no such materials wherewith to fabricate a political justification.

The Protestants had liberty, from 1577 and thereafter, to build houses for public worship, though not to call them “churches;” they were “temples.” But in 1661, when the death of Mazarin was a signal for mutilating the edict by perverse misinterpretations, a very large proportion of these “temples” was appropriated by the Roman Catholics, or thrown down, on the plea that there were no written title-deeds, or that during the civil wars they had been forfeited and consecrated to Roman worship. With such explanations or with none, Louis XIV. took about one-half of their temples from the Huguenots from 1661 to 1673. Locke writes in his Journal in 1676 as to the Protestants of Usez in Languedoc, “Their temple is ordered to be pulled down, the only one they have left there, though three-quarters of the town be Protestants. The pretence given is, that their temple being too near the Papist church, their singing of psalms disturbed the service.” Such arbitrary spoliation was a motive to be “converted.” So was the exclusion of Huguenots, first from learned professions, and gradually from every trade. The impossibility of earning a livelihood was a chastisement of the unconverted, to last until their conversion. The Protestants at Nismes (says Locke) “had built themselves an hospital for their sick, but that is taken from them; a chamber in it is left for their sick, but never used, because the priests trouble them when there.” But priests and monks had liberty to enter private houses wherever there was a sick or dying Protestant. The suffering and the languishing were thus tortured with arguments and upbraidings; with combined threatenings and entreaties to pray to the Virgin and to abandon their faith and hope concerning Christ and salvation. We can understand how Mademoiselle de Cire, niece of the Marquis de Ruvigny, was, when dying in London, “ever magnifying the goodness of God that she died in a country where she could in peace give up her soul to him that made it.” [Lady Russell’s Letters.]

