Miniatures of French history

Two scenes, half a lifetime apart, small, detailed, vivid, mark the enormous storm of the Reformation in the Gauls—that vast battle which was never wholly won or lost, no, not to this day; for France is the arena of Europe. Each of these little scenes was an origin: the one of the force that half-reconquered Europe for the Church, the Jesuits; the other of the force that, taking arms for Calvinism, all but conquered the crown—the force of the great nobles in rebellion, of the gentry, of the merchants in their towns, and of the peasants in the central hills, the Huguenots.

In the morning of Saturday, August the 15th, in the year 1534, the Feast of the Assumption, six men of various age came to the little room on the hill of the university, where lived, determined, eager, somewhat silent, a dark, square-headed Basque, whose military temper was to half change the world. An intense devotion, a burning life within, an absorption in divine things and in the fate of the soul, made this man single from all of his fellows. None met him but went away with an impression as of flame. It was Ignatius of Loyola in his forty-fourth year.

The six who thus came together up the stone stairs to that little room, with its crucifix, its narrow bed, its bare table, its empty walls, were all men who had come under that profound influence; men of the university, like himself—men already filled with the conception of a mission. There, leading them, was yet another Basque, called from his mother’s name Xavier, six years younger than the chief. There was young Salman of Toledo, a boy of nineteen; there was Laynez the Castilian, just of age; Alphonso of Valladolid; Rodriguez of Portugal; and (the only Gaul among them) a peasant from the hills of Savoy, long plunged into the study of the academies, not yet thirty: Faber, from the hamlet, and the Alpine huts of Villaret. He alone was a priest.

When they were thus assembled they set out about their purpose.

They went them down the university hill by that straight and narrow Roman street which crosses Paris from south to north, and is here the street of St. James, there of St. Martin. They traversed the twin bridges of the island, they went the full mile to the city wall, passed through St. Martin’s Gate, and, outside, were in the fields. The hill of Montmartre stood before them, its gypsum quarries, its crazy windmills, and on the summit a little old church—poor, for it had few parishioners. It was called Our Lady of the Martyrs, and thither were they bound upon this, Her feast day.

They climbed the hill. They went down by the little stair near the porch, which leads into the crypt of that strange place, and where the stones go back to the temple of the pagan days. Faber vested and began the Mass.

When he came to the Communion, the six laymen rose and knelt at the altar rails. Then, one by one in order each, before receiving the Host, took in a loud voice the vow of their companionship, and Faber himself, the last, pronounced those words. The Ablutions were received. The post-Communions read, the last Gospel recited. The Society of Jesus was founded.

The winter was not over in Blois—the winter of 1560. The old king, who had so sternly maintained the national religion, was dead; a boy of fifteen reigned—frail, incompetent, diseased—the son of that Medicean woman whom an enemy has called “the worm from the tomb of Italy.”

The child was married to a child-wife, the daughter of the King of Scotland, Mary Stuart. It was she, in part, already masterful, that had called to that Court her mother’s brothers, the sons of Lorraine, the Guises; grandsons of that same man who had entered his capital of Nancy on the death of Charles the Bold.

And they were hated. They were not of the national nobility; they had enriched themselves scandalously. If they were to be the protectors of the Church, it was but another weakness for the Church. One of their group, a child of fourteen, had been made Archbishop of Rheims, and loaded with the wealth of such great names as Cluny—St. Bernard’s glorious house; as Marmoutier—St. Martin’s immemorial foundation. Scandal! Scandal!

Against these men, against the new, feeble, immature king, rose muttering throughout the commonwealth all forms of opposition, linked under the bond (here loose, there strict) of the Reform, of the Gospellers, of them that would be rid of their fathers, and who were clamped to the iron of Calvin. He, far off in Geneva, commanded. Already, some few months since, the Reformers had organized everywhere. They had held their first synod, making them one thing throughout the territory of France, and, by hundreds, the armed gentry were rallying, though secretly, to that standard. Men from all countries leaked in to take service in the coming war as mercenaries. Many from the Germanies, many from Switzerland. They were sworn in secrecy by the German freebooters’ oath: “To follow the dumb captain.” And of the native people crowds were ready, when the signal should be given, to join the nobles who were moving. By little groups, and as single men, they came filtering through towards the Loire.

What could the Guises bring against that? There were no armies in those days, save such guards as the king could pay, or such gentry as would still obey his summons.

The plot was laid to seize the crowned boy while the Court thus still sat in Blois, for the town was open and without walls. A mob could carry it. The leaders still professed that to this boy they wished no harm. It was his counsellors they would be rid of, and all their hatred was for the Guises—especially for the duke, their head, the real ruler.

But before the appointed day the young king, restless, must be moving down river. He would hunt, and he was tired of the woods to the west and to the south. The Court set out. It was through this chance whim that the rising was postponed and lost its vigour. It was through this chance whim that the threatened Court found itself safe in the little stronghold of Amboise.

As it there sat it felt in the air a menace all around. They had summoned and held hostage in the castle one or two of the greatest among those whom they knew to be their secret enemies. But the populace also was astir. Not all looks were kind, and there were strange men on market days.

Some order misunderstood, some rashness, provoked a misfire. A crowd of men made for the castle, not all of them unarmed, professing that they must see the king. They were rejected; contemptuously enough young Francis II. even scattered coins among them, as being of the poor and common people. That was only the grumbling of something distant.

It was on Saturday, the 16th of March, that the storm broke; but even then, ill-led. Men came swarming out from the woods on the south of the town. It was an armed attack. It has been called “The Tumult of Amboise.” The leaders were few, ill-chosen and worse followed. Not enough of the gentry were there. Horsemen and armour were lacking. It could but fail. The gates were shut in time, the ramparts armed, the wave of attack broke against impregnable walls; it was shot down under the trained aim of the archers; it was pursued, dispersed, driven to its woods again, and, on the way, whole dozens were rounded up and bound, and beaten, and thrust back into the castle as prisoners. For days the hanging of them went on, from the gibbet of the town itself, from the beams of the main gateway of the castle, from the iron crooks on its walls.

The thing was over, and it had seemed small. The young queen had laughed at it. But it was the beginning of that tremendous business which was to fill all France with death and the destruction of lovely stone; to sow a permanent division, to leave, much later, the Bourbons supreme, and not even to end when the thirteenth Louis should have ridden out to strike the last blow at La Rochelle—how many years to come!