the councils, and it had no power to inflict. civil punishment on
odenders. Thus “we ought,” as Lindsay says, “to see in the
disciplinary powers and punishments of the Consistory of
Geneva not an exhibition of the working of the Church organized
on the principles of Calvin, but the ordinary procedure of
the town council of a medieval city. Their petty punishments
and their minute interferences with private life are only special
instances of what was common to all municipal rule in the 16th
century.” This is true of the supreme crime of heresy, which
in the notorious case of Servetus was only an expression of rules
laid down over a thousand years earlier in the Theodosian Code.
Geneva, however, with its most distinguished of Protestant theologians,
became a school of Protestantism, which sent its trained
men into the Netherlands, England and Scotland, and especially
across the border into France. It served too as a place of refuge
for thousands of the persecuted adherents of its beliefs. Ca1vin’s
book furnished the Protestants not only with a compact and
admirably written handbook of theology, vigorous and clear,
but with a system of Church government and a code of morals.
After the death of Francis I., his successor, Henry II., set himself even more strenuously- to extirpate heresy; a special branch of the parlement of Paris—the so-called Chambre ardente (q.v.)—for the trial of heresy cases was established, and the fierce edict of Chateaubriand (June 1551) explicitly adopted many of the expedients of the papal inquisition. While hundreds were imprisoned or burned, Protestants seemed steadily to increase in numbers, and finally only the expostulations of the parlement of Paris prevented the king from introducing the Inquisition in France in accordance with the wishes of the pope and the cardinal of Lorraine. The civil tribunals, however, practically assumed the functions of regular inquisitorial courts, in spite of the objections urged by the ecclesiastical courts. Notwithstanding these measures for their extermination, the French Protestants were proceeding to organize a church in accordance with the conceptions of the early Christian communities as Calvin described them in his Institutes. Beginning with Paris, some fifteen communities with their consistories were established in French towns between 1555 and 1560. In spite of continued persecution a national synod was assembled in Paris in 1559, representing at least twelve Protestant churches in Normandy and central France, which drew up a confession of faith and a book of church discipline. It appears to have been from France rather than from Geneva that the Presbyterian churches of Holland, Scotland and the United States derived their form of government. A reaction against the extreme severity of the king’s courts became apparent at this date. Du Bourg and others ventured warmly to defend the Protestants in the parlement of Paris in the very presence of the king and of the cardinal of Lorraine. The higher aristocracy began now to be attracted by the new doctrines, or at least repelled by the flagrant power enjoyed by the Guises during the brief reign of Francis II. (1559–1560). Protestantism was clearly becoming inextricably associated with politics of a very intricate sort. The leading members of the Bourbon branch of the royal family, and Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France, were conspicuous among the converts to Calvinism. Persecution was revived by the Guises, Du Bourg, the brave defender of the Protestants, was burned as a heretic; yet Calvin could in the closing years of his life form a cheerful estimate that some three hundred thousand of his countrymen had been won over to his views. The death of Francis II. enabled Catherine de' Medici, the queen mother, to assert herself against the Guises, and become the regent of her ten-year-old son Charles IX. A meeting of the States General had already been summoned to consider the state of the realm. Michel de l'H6pital, the chancellor, who opened the assembly, was an advocate of toleration; he deprecated the abusive use of the terms “Lutherans,” “Papists” and “Huguenots,” and advocated deferring all action until a council should have been called. The deputies of the clergy were naturally conservative, but advocated certain reforms, an abolition of the Concordat, and a re-establishment of the older Pragmatic Sanction. The noblesse were divided on the matter of toleration, but the ca/tiers (lists of grievances and suggestions for reform) submitted by the Third Estate demanded, besides regular meetings of the estates every five years, complete toleration and a reform of the Church. This grew a little later into the recommendation that the revenues and possessions of the French Church should be appropriated by the government, which, after properly subsidizing the clergy, might hope, it was estimated, that a surplus of twenty-two millions of livres would accrue to the State. Two hundred and thirty years later this plan was realized in the Civil 'Constitution of the Clergy. The deliberations of 1561 resulted in the various reforms, the suspension of persecution and the liberation of Huguenot prisoners. These were not accorded freedom of worship, but naturally took advantage of the situation to carry on their services more publicly than ever before. An unsuccessful effort was made at the conference of Poissy to bring the two religious parties together; Beza had an opportunity to defend the Calvinistic cause, and Lainez, the general of the Order of Jesus, that of the bishop of Rome. The government remained tolerant toward the movement, and in January 1562 the Huguenots were given permission to hold public services outside the walls of fortified towns and were not forbidden to meet in private houses within the walls. Catherine, who had promoted these measures, cared nothing for the Protestants, but desired the support of the Bourbon princes. The country was Catholic, and disturbances inevitably occurred, culminating in the attack of the duke of Guise and his troops on the Protestants at Vassy, less than two months after the issuing of the edict.
It is impossible to review here the Wars of Religion which distracted France, from the “massacre of Vassy” to the publication of the edict of Nantes, thirty-six years later. Religious issues became more and more dominated by purely political and dynastic ambitions, and the whole situation was constantly affected by the policy of Philip II. and the struggle going on in the Netherlands. Henry IV. was admirably fitted to reunite France once more, and, after a, superficial conversion to the Catholic faith, to meet the needs of his former co-religionists, the Huguenots. The edict of Nantes recapitulated and codified the provisions of a series of earlier edicts of toleration, which had come with each truce during the previous generation. Liberty of conscience in religious matters was secured and the right of private worship to those of the “so-called Reformed religion.” Public worship was permitted everywhere where it had existed in 1596–1597, in two places within each bailliage and sénéchaussée, and in the chateaux of the Protestant nobility, with slight restrictions in the case of lower nobility. Protestants were placed upon a political equality and made eligible to all public offices. To ensure these rights, they were left in military control of two hundred towns, including La Rochelle, Montauban and Montpellier. Tealous of their “sharing the State with the king ” Richelieu twenty-five years later reduced the exceptional privileges of the Huguenots, and with the advent of Louis XIV. they began to suffer renewed persecution, which the king at last flattered himself had so far reduced their number that in 1685 he revoked the edict of Nantes and reduced the Protestants to the status of outlaws. It was not until 1786 that they were restored to their civil rights, and by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in 1789, to their religious freedom.
Contemporaneously with the Wars of Religion in France a long and terrible struggle between the king of Spain and his Dutch and Belgian provinces had resulted in the formation of a Protestant statw-the United Netherlands, which was destined to play an important rôleThe United Netherlands and their importance in the history of toleration. in the history of the Reformed religion. Open both German and French influences, the Netherlands had been the scene of the first executions of Lutherans; they had been a centre of Anabaptist agitation; but Calvinism finally triumphed in the Confession of Dordrecht, since Ca1vin’s system of church government did not, like
