Another argument against Protestants resorting to civil war, was that political malcontents, bigots of the Roman Catholic creed, often joined their ranks, and gave a bad colour to their designs. Such a malcontent made advances to them in 1615—viz., the Prince of Condé who induced the justly-honoured Protestant Henri, Duc 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 Félice, p. 294, 2de edit.)
If the fall of La Rochelle and the other cautionary towns has been ascribed to the luke-warmness 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, 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 tranquility, 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 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.
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. Four years before, the province of Poictou had been the scene of the first experiment of employing dragoons as missionaries. The Manquis de Louvois, having dragoons under him, and being anxious to regain his former ascendency over Louis, 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:—
