Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/15

 

kingdom of France was not devoted to the Pope; and the liberties, which its Government maintained in opposition to Papal ambition, might have made the king and his ministers sympathise with the Huguenots in their love of toleration. Unfortunately, however, the very fact that French royalty could not please the Pope in some things, made it all the more willing to please him in other things. And the persecution of the Protestants was the one thing which the Pope clamorously asked and promptly received as an atonement for all insubordination. This violence pleased not only the Pope, but also the father-confessors, whose powers of absolution were in great demand with a dissolute king and court. Any apologies for this persecution, alleging that the Roman Catholic authorities had other motives than sheer bigotry or brutality, are either untruthful harangues, or mere exercises of ingenuity, dealing not with things but with phrases.

In 1681 the province of Poictou was the scene of the first experiment of employing dragoons as missionaries. The Marquis de Louvois, having dragoons under him, and being anxious to regain his former ascendancy over Louis XIV., was eager “to mix the soldiers up” with the work of converting heretics. Their intervention was not only a contribution of physical force, but had also a legal effect; because resistance to his Majesty’s troops was seditious. Before the introduction of the “booted missionaries,” conversions had not made any perceptible change in the statistics of Protestantism. In 1676 Locke, who resided fourteen months in Montpellier, made the following entry in his diary:— “They tell me the number of Protestants within the last twenty or thirty years has manifestly increased here, and does daily, notwithstanding their loss every day of some privilege or other.” The dragoons changed this to a great extent in 1681. At that date refugees in considerable numbers came to England, of whose reception I shall speak in a subsequent Section.

The climax was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes — that is, the repeal of the law or treaty made by Henri IV. — a repeal which left Louis XIV. under the dominion of the fearful clause of his coronation-oath on the extermination of heretics. Unqualified and exaggerated loyalty, without the menacing safeguards of a treaty, was thus no defence to the Protestants. The privileges of the edict had, during many years, been revoked one by one, first by explaining away the meaning of the phrases and clauses of that legal document, but latterly without any reason, and by the mere declaration of the king’s pleasure. “I am above the edict,” said Louis XIV. So the “revocation”" in 1685 was merely the destruction of the surviving sealing-wax, ink, and parchment. 