Chapter VI: Who Will Be the Reformer of France?

(1526.)

Many evangelical christians thought as Toussaint did. They felt that France had need of a reformer, but could see no one who answered to their ideal. A man of God was wanted, who, possessing the fundamental truths of the Gospel, could set them forth in their living harmony; who, while exalting the divine essence of Christianity, could present it in its relations to human nature; who was fitted not only to establish sound doctrine, but also by God’s grace to shed abroad a new life in the Church; a servant of God, full of courage, full of activity, as skilful in governing as in leading. A Paul was wanted, but where could he be found?

Would it be Lefèvre? He had taught plainly the doctrine of justification by faith, even before Luther; this we have stated elsewhere,[529] and many have repeated it since. It is a truth gained to history. But Lefèvre was old and courted repose; pious but timid, a scholar of the closet rather than the reformer of a people.

Would it be Roussel? Possessing an impressionable and wavering heart, he longed for the good, but did not always dare to do it. He preached frequently at the duchess’s court before the most distinguished men of the kingdom; but he did not proclaim the whole counsel of God. He knew it, he was angry with himself, and yet he was continually falling into the same error. ‘Alas!’ he wrote to Farel, ‘there are many evangelical truths one half of which I am obliged to conceal. If the Lord does not rekindle my zeal by his presence, I shall be very inferior to what I ought to be.’[530] The pious but weak Roussel was just the man the duchess required--fitted to advance christian life without touching the institutions of the Church. Sometimes, however, dissatisfied with his position, and longing to preach the Gospel without any respect to persons, he wished to go to Italy ... and then he fell again into temporising.[531]

The most decided christians saw his incompetence. In their eyes the men round the Duchess of Alençon who stopped halfway were incapable of reforming France. It needed, they thought, a man of simple soul, intrepid heart, and powerful eloquence, who, walking with a firm foot, would give a new impulse to the work too feebly commenced by Lefèvre and his friends; and then these christians, going to the other extreme, thought of Farel. At that time this reformer was the greatest light of France. What love he had for Jesus Christ! What eloquence in preaching! What boldness in pressing onwards and surmounting obstacles! What perseverance in the midst of dangers! But neither Francis nor Margaret would have anything to do with him: they were afraid of him. When the king recalled the other exiles, Farel was left behind. He was then at Strasburg with one foot on the frontier, waiting the order for his return, but the order did not come. The court had no taste for his aggressive preaching and his heroic firmness; they wished for a softened and a perfumed Gospel in France. The noble Dauphinese, when he saw all his friends returning to their country while he remained alone in exile, was overwhelmed with sorrow and cried to God in his distress.

Roussel understood Margaret’s fears; Farel, he knew, was not a courtier, and would never agree with the duchess. Yet, knowing the value of such a servant of God, the noble and pious Roussel tried whether they could not profit in some other way by his great activity, and if there was not some province that could be opened to his mighty labours. ‘I will obtain the means of providing for all your wants,’ he wrote to him on the 27th of August from the castle of Amboise, ‘until the Lord gives you at last an entrance and brings you to us.’[532] That was also Farel’s earnest desire; he was not then thinking of Switzerland; his country possessed all his love; his eyes were turned night and day towards those gates of France so obstinately closed against him; he went up to them and knocked. They still remained shut, and returning disheartened he exclaimed: ‘Oh! if the Lord would but open a way for me to return and labour in France!’ On a sudden the dearest of his wishes seemed about to be realised.

One day, when there was a grand reception at court, the two sons of Prince Robert de la Marche came to pay their respects to the king’s sister. Since the eighth century La Marche had formed a principality, which afterwards became an appanage of the Armagnacs and Bourbons.[533] The Gospel had found its way there. Margaret, who possessed in a high degree the spirit of proselytism, said to Roussel, indicating with her eyes those whose conversion she desired: ‘Speak to those two young princes; seize, I pray, this opportunity of advancing the cause of Jesus Christ.’--‘I will do so,’ replied the chaplain eagerly. Approaching the young noblemen, Roussel began to converse about the Gospel. De Saucy and De Giminetz (for such were their names) showed no signs of astonishment, but listened with the liveliest interest. The evangelist grew bolder, and explained his wishes to them freely.[534] ‘It is not for yourselves alone,’ he said, ‘that God has given you life, but for the good of the members of Jesus Christ. It is not enough for you to embrace Christ as your Saviour; you must communicate the same grace to your subjects.’[535] Roussel warmed at the idea of seeing the Gospel preached among the green pastures which the Vienne, the Creuse, and the Cher bathe with their waters; through Guéret, Bellac, and the ancient territory of the Lemovices and Bituriges. The two young princes on their part listened attentively to the reformer, and gave the fullest assent to his words.[536] Margaret’s chaplain made another step; he thought he had found what he was seeking for the zealous Farel; and when the sons of Robert de la Marche told him they felt too weak for the task set before them, he said: ‘I know but one man fitted for such a great work; it is William Farel; Christ has given him an extraordinary talent for making known the riches of his glory. Invite him.’ The proposition delighted the young princes. ‘We desire it still more than you,’ they said; ‘our father and we will open our arms to him. He shall be to us as a son, a brother, and a father.[537] Let him fear nothing: he shall live with us. Yes, in our own palace. All whom he will meet there are friends of Jesus Christ. Our physician, Master Henry, a truly christian man; the son of the late Count Francis; the lord of Château-Rouge, and his children, and many others, will rejoice at his arrival. We ourselves,’ they added, ‘will be there to receive him. Only bid him make haste; let him come before next Lent.’--‘I promise you he shall,’ replied Roussel. The two princes undertook to set up a printing establishment in order that Farel might by means of the press circulate evangelical truth, not only in La Marche, but throughout the kingdom. Roussel wrote immediately to his friend; Toussaint added his entreaties to those of the chaplain. ‘Never has any news caused me more joy,’ he said; ‘hasten thither as fast as you can.’[538]

The young princes of La Marche were not the only nobles of the court whom the Duchess of Alençon’s influence attracted into the paths of the Gospel. Margaret was not one of ‘those who cry aloud,’ says a christian of her time, ‘but of those whose every word is accompanied with teaching and imbued with gentleness.’ Her eye was always on the watch to discover souls whom she could attract to her Master. Lords, ladies, and damsels of distinction, men of letters, of the robe, of the sword, and even of the Church, heard, either from her lips, or from those of Roussel or of some other of her friends, the Word of life. The nobility entertained a secret but very old dislike to the priests, who had so often infringed their privileges; and they would have liked nothing better than to be emancipated from their yoke. Margaret feared that the young nobles would be only half converted--that there would be no renewal of the heart and life in them; and the history of the wars of religion shows but too plainly how well her fears were founded. Knowing how difficult it is ‘to tread the path to heaven,’ she insisted on the necessity of a real and moral christianity, and said to the gay youths attracted by the charms of her person and the splendour of her rank:

Who would be a christian true
Must his Lord’s example follow;
Every worldly good resign
And earthly glory count but hollow;

Honour, wealth, and friends so sweet
He must trample under feet:--
But, alas! to few ’tis given
Thus to tread the path to heaven!

With a willing joyful heart
His goods among the poor divide;
Others’ trespasses forgive;
Revenge and anger lay aside.
Be good to those who work you ill;
If any hate you, love them still:--
But, alas! to few ’tis given
Thus to tread the path to heaven!

He must hold death beautiful,
And over it in triumph sing;
Love it with a warmer heart
Than he loveth mortal thing.
In the pain that wrings the flesh
Find a pleasure, and in sadness;
Love death as he loveth life,
With a more than mortal gladness:--
But, alas! to few ’tis given
Thus to tread the path to heaven![539]

Would Margaret succeed? A queen with all the splendours of her station is not a good reformer; the work needs poor and humble men. There is always danger when princes turn missionaries; some of the persons around them easily become hypocrites. Margaret attracted men to the Gospel; but the greater part of those who were called by her did not go far; their christianity remained superficial. There were, indeed, many enlightened understandings in the upper ranks of French society, but there were few consciences smitten by the Word of God. Many--and this is a common error in every age--could see nothing but intellectual truths in the doctrine of Jesus Christ: a fatal error that may decompose the religious life of a Church and destroy the national life of a people. No tendency is more opposed to evangelical protestantism, which depends not upon the intellectual, but upon the moral faculty. When Luther experienced those terrible struggles in the convent at Erfurth, it was because his troubled conscience sought for peace; and we may say of the Reformation, that it always began with the awakening of the conscience. Conscience is the palladium of protestantism, far more than the statue of Pallas was the pledge of the preservation of Troy. If the nobility compromised the Reformation in France, it was because their consciences had not been powerfully awakened.

Farel would have been the man fitted for this work. He was one of those whose simple, serious, earnest tones carry away the masses. His voice of thunder made his hearers tremble. The strength of his convictions created faith in their souls, the fervour of his prayers raised them to heaven. When they listened to him, ‘they felt,’ as Calvin says, ‘not merely a few light pricks and stings, but were wounded and pierced to the heart; and hypocrisy was dragged from those wonderful and _more than tortuous_ hiding-places which lie deep in the heart of man.’ He pulled down and built up with equal energy. Even his life--an apostle-ship full of self-sacrifice, danger, and triumph--was as effectual as his sermons. He was not only a minister of the Word; he was a bishop also. He was able to discern the young men fitted to wield the weapons of the Gospel, and to direct them in the great war of the age. Farel never attacked a place, however difficult of access, which he did not take. Such was the man then called into France, and who seemed destined to be its reformer. The letters of Roussel and Toussaint inviting Farel were conveyed to Strasburg, and arrived there in the month of December 1526.

Farel, who had remained alone in that city after the departure of his friends, kept, as we have already mentioned, his eyes turned towards France. He waited and waited still, hesitating to go to Switzerland, whither he was invited; but those gates of France, from which he could not turn away his eyes, still remained closed. He reflected; he asked himself what place God had reserved for him. His piercing glance would have desired to penetrate the future.... Should he not return into Dauphiny? At Gap and Manosque he had relatives favourable to the Gospel: his brother Walter, clerk of the episcopal court; his brother Jean-Jacques, who expounded the Bible with as much boldness as himself; Antoine Aloat, the notary, who had married one of his nieces; his brother-in-law, the noble Honorat Riquetti, ‘one of the ancestors of Mirabeau,’ as the record-keeper of the Hautes Alpes informs us.[540] There are certainly few names we might be more surprised at seeing brought together than those of Farel and Mirabeau; and yet between these two Frenchmen there are at least two points of contact: the power of their eloquence, and the boldness of their reforms.

Farel did not return to Gap; had he done so, we may suppose how he would have been received, from the reception given to him some years later the particulars of which an archæologist has discovered in the ‘Annals of the Capuchins’ of Gap. Farel, already an old man, wishing to preach the Gospel in his native country before God summoned him from the world, went and took up his quarters in a corn-mill at the gates of his native town, where he ‘dogmatised’ the peasants from a French Bible, which he explained ‘in his fashion’--to use the words of the Roman-catholic author. Erelong he began to preach in the very heart of the town, in a chapel dedicated to St. Colomba. The magistrate forbade his speaking, and the parliament of Grenoble desired ‘to have him burnt,’ say the Capuchins. Farel replied by a formal refusal of obedience; upon which the vice-bailiff, Benedict Olier, a zealous catholic, escorted by several sergeants and police officers, proceeded to the chapel where Farel was preaching. The door was shut; they knocked, but nobody answered; they broke in, and found a considerable throng; no one turned his head, all were listening greedily to the reformer’s words. The officers of justice went straight to the pulpit; Farel was seized, and with ‘the crime’ (the Bible) in his hand, according to the forcible expression of the Capuchins, was led through the crowd and shut up in prison. But the followers of the new doctrine were already to be found in every class--in the workman’s garret, in the tradesman’s shop, in the fortified mansion of the noble, and sometimes even in the bishop’s palace. During the night the reformers, either by force or stratagem, took the brave old man out of prison, carried him to the ramparts, and let him down into the fields in a basket. ‘Accomplices’ were waiting for him, and the preacher escaped along with them.[541] Now let us return to the year 1526.

Berthold Haller, the reformer of Berne, invited Farel to Switzerland. The Bernese possessed certain districts in Roman Switzerland where a missionary speaking the French language was necessary. The invitations of the pious Haller were repeated. If France is shut, Switzerland is opening; Farel can hesitate no longer; God removes him from one of these countries and calls him to the other; he will obey.

Farel, sadly grieved at the thought that his native country rejected him, modestly departed from Strasburg, on foot, one day in the month of December 1526; and, journeying up the Rhine, directed his steps towards those Alpine districts of which he became one of the greatest reformers.[542] He was on the road when the messenger of Toussaint and Roussel arrived at Strasburg.... It was too late. His friends, knowing that he was going to Berne, sent the letters after him, and it was at Aigle, where Farel had set up as a schoolmaster, that he received the invitation of the lords of La Marche. What shall he do? He might return. Shall he put aside the call of God and of the lords of Berne to follow that which the princes have sent him? There was a fierce struggle in his soul. Was not France his birthplace? It was; but ... it is too late! God has spoken, he said to himself; and though invited by princes, Farel remained at the humble desk in his little school in the small town of Aigle, situated between the majestic Dent du Midi and the rugged glaciers of the Diablerets. Thus the reformer whom many christians thought of for France was lost to her.

France was not, however, without resources; she still possessed Berquin, whom some called her _Luther_; but while the exiles and the prisoners had heard the hour of their deliverance strike, Berquin, though treated with more consideration, was still deprived of his liberty. Margaret was unwearied in her petitions to the king. She even attempted to soften Montmorency; but the Romish theologians made every attempt to counteract her influence. Friends and enemies were equally of opinion that if Berquin were free, he would deal many a hard blow at the hierarchy. At length, after an eight months’ struggle, Margaret triumphed; Berquin left his prison in November 1526, just at the time when Farel was leaving France.

The Duchess of Alençon’s gratitude immediately burst forth. Calling Montmorency by a tenderer name than usual, she said: ‘I thank you, my son, for the pleasure you have done me in the cause of poor Berquin. You may say that you have taken me from prison, for I value it as a favour done to myself.’[543] ... ‘My lord,’ she wrote to the king, ‘my desire to obey your commands was already very great, but you have doubled it by the charity you have been pleased to show towards poor Berquin. He for whom he suffered will take pleasure in the mercy you have shown his servant and yours for your honour; and the confusion of those who have forgotten God will not be less than the perpetual glory which God will give you.’[544]

As soon as Berquin was free he began to meditate on his great work, which was to destroy the power of error. His liberation was not in his eyes a simple deliverance from prison--it was a call. He cared little (as Erasmus entreated him) to indulge in sweet repose on the banks of the Somme; his earnest desire was to fight. He held that the life of a christian man should be a continual warfare. No truce with Satan! Now, to him, Satan was the Sorbonne, and he had no more doubts about the victory than if the war were ended already. Berquin was universally known, loved, and respected. To Farel’s decision and zeal he added a knowledge of the world, which was then most necessary. Margaret clung to him at least as much as to Roussel. It was generally thought among christians that God had brought him forth from prison in order to set him at the head of the Reform in France: Berquin himself thought so. The friends of the Reformation rejoiced, and an important circumstance increased their hopes.

Another joy was in store for Margaret. Francis perceived at last that Henry VIII. preferred Anne Boleyn to his illustrious sister, whose maid of honour she had formerly been. From that hour he no longer opposed the wishes of the King of Navarre, and in November consented to his union with Madame of Alençon.

On the 24th of January, 1527, a brilliant throng filled the chapel of the palace of St. Germain, where the marriage of the king’s sister was to be solemnised, and every mouth extolled the genius, grace, and virtues of the princess. Margaret of France and Henry d’Albret were united, and for a week there were magnificent tournaments. Francis made very fine promises to the married pair. ‘Make your mind easy,’ he said to Henry; ‘I will summon the emperor to restore your kingdom of Navarre, and if he refuses, I will give you an army to recover it.’[545] But not long after, this prince, when drawing up a diplomatic paper by which he bound Charles V. to restore his two sons, then hostages at Madrid, inserted this clause: ‘_Item_, the said king promises not to assist or favour the King of Navarre in recovering his kingdom, although he has married his beloved and only sister.’[546]

At that time Margaret was thinking of other things than earthly kingdoms. At this solemn moment she turned her eyes towards eternity, and poured out her heart on the bosom of a friend. ‘A thousand chances may separate us from this world,’ she said to Madame de la Rochefoucauld. ‘Whether we be near or far, in peace or in war, on horseback or in our bed ... God takes and leaves whom he pleases.’[547] The queen soon found that her lot was not all sunshine, and that Henry d’Albret’s humour was not always the same. Her husband’s weakness urged her to seek more earnestly ‘the heavenly lover,’ as she said to Madame de la Rochefoucauld; and the splendid wedding, which was long talked of, made her desire the better marriage. It was then she wrote:

Would that the day were come, O Lord,
So much desired by me,
When by the cords of heavenly love
I shall be drawn to thee!
United in eternal life,
The husband thou, and I the wife.

That wedding-day, O Lord,
My heart so longs to see,
That neither wealth, nor fame, nor rank
Can pleasure give to me.
To me the world no more
Can yield delight.
Unless thou, Lord, be with me there ...
Lo! all is dark as night.[548]

Prayer did not constitute the sole happiness of the new queen: activity, charity, an eagerness to help others, did not bring her less pleasure. By her marriage she acquired more liberty to protect the Reform. ‘All eyes are fixed on you,’ Capito wrote to her.[549] She thought that Roussel her confessor, and Michael of Aranda her bishop, were about to advance notably the kingdom of God, and rejoiced at seeing these men of learning and morality pronounce daily more strongly in favour of the truth.[550]

The world was at one of the great turning-points of its history; and the friends of letters and of the Gospel said to themselves that France, which had always been in the van of society during the middle ages, would not now fall to the rear. Pure faith, they thought, would penetrate every class, would renew the fountains of moral life, and teach the people at once obedience and liberty. Placed between the middle and the modern age, Francis I. would make the new times replace the old in everything. All, in fact, was changing. Gothic architecture gave way to the creations of the Renaissance; the study of the classic authors took the place of the scholasticism of the universities; and in the halls of the palace, mingled with nobles and priests, was seen a crowd of new persons--philologers, archæologists, poets, painters, and doctors of the Roman law. When the light was thus making its way everywhere, would the Church alone remain closed against it? The Renaissance had opened the gates to a new era; and the Reformation would give the new generation the strength necessary to enter them.

But where was the man who could give to the world, and especially wherever the French language was spoken, that strong and salutary impulse? It was not Lefèvre, Roussel, Farel, or Berquin.... Who was it then?

It is time that we should learn to know him.