In the History of His Own Time, Bishop Burnet mentions the promise contained in the Revocation Edict, that “though all the public exercises of the religion were now suppressed, yet those of that persuasion who lived quietly should not be disturbed on that account” — but how was that promise kept?
“Not only the dragoons, but all the clergy and the bigots of France broke out into all the instances of rage and fury against such as did not change, upon their being required in the king’s name to be of his religion (for that was the style everywhere). . . . I saw and knew so many instances of their injustice and violence, that it exceeded what even could have been imagined; for all men set their thoughts on work to invent new methods of cruelty. In all the towns through which I passed, I heard the most dismal account of those things possible. . . . One in the streets could have known the new converts, as they were passing by them, by a cloudy dejection that appeared in their looks and deportment. Such as endeavoured to make their escape, and were seized (for guards and secret agents were spread along the whole roads and frontier of France), were, if men, condemned to the galleys; and, if women, to monasteries. To complete this cruelty, orders were given that such of the new converts as did not at their death receive the sacrament, should be denied burial, and that their bodies should be left where other dead carcases were cast out, to be devoured by wolves or dogs. This was executed in several places with the utmost barbarity; and it gave all people so much horror that it was let drop.” “I went over the greatest part of France, while the persecution was in its hottest rage, from Marseilles to Montpellier, and from thence to Lyons, and so on to Geneva.”
British Christians heard the tidings with tears and forebodings. John Evelyn, in his Diary, under date 3d November, notes:—
“The French persecution of the Protestants, raging with the utmost barbarity, exceeded even what the very heathens used. . . . I was shewn the harangue which the Bishop of Valentia-on-Rhone made in the name of the clergy, celebrating the French king as if he was a god for persecuting the poor Protestants, with this expression in it, ‘That as his victory over heresy was greater than all the conquests of Alexander and Caesar, it was but what was wished in England; and that God seemed to raise the French king to this power and magnanimous action, that he might be in capacity to assist in doing the same there.’ This paragraph is very bold and remarkable.”
A few sentences in Lady Russell’s Letters give an affecting view of those times:—
I. Nov. 1685. — “I read a letter last night from my sister at Paris. She writes as everybody that has human affections must, and says that of 1,800,000, there is not more than 10,000 left in France; and they, I guess, will soon be converted by the dragoons,[1] or perish.”
II. 15th Jan. 1686. — “The accounts from France are more and more astonishing; the perfecting the work is vigorously pursued, and by this time completed, ’tis thought, all, without exception, having a day given them. . . . ’Tis enough to sink the strongest heart to read the accounts sent over. How the children are torn from their mothers and sent into monasteries, their mothers to another, the husband to prison or the galleys.”
III. 5th Oct. 1687. — “I hear the French king, as a finishing stroke, is preparing an edict which all new converts shall sign — though so weak as to have signed before, yet they must now again — that they have been instructed, and are in their hearts convinced of the doctrine and practice of the Roman Church,” &c.
Perhaps the last extract refers to the following form of declaration:—
“I, _____, of the parish of _____, do certify unto all whom it may concern, that having acknowledged the falseness of the Pretended Reformed, and the truth of the Catholic religion, of my own free will, and without any compulsion, I have made profession of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion in the church of _____.”
The Protestant male prisoners were sent to the galleys among the criminal convicts. Their crimes were either refusing to be converted, and attempting to emigrate, or assisting their brethren to escape from France. In the galleys of Marseilles and Dunkirk, they not only had to suffer for the crime that brought them there, but were compelled to repeat the crime of refusing adoration to the Virgin, to
- ↑ “A day was appointed for the conversion of a certain district, and the dragoons made their appearance accordingly. They took possession of the Protestants’ houses; destroyed all that they could not consume or carry away; turned the parlours into stables for their horses; treated the owners of the houses with every species of cruelty, depriving them of food, beating them, burning some alive, half-roasting others and then letting them go; tying mothers securely to posts, and leaving their sucking infants to perish at their feet; hanging some upon hooks in the chimneys, and smoking them with wisps of wet straw till they were suffocated. Some they dipped in wells; others they bound down, and poured wine into them through funnels, until reason was destroyed. And many other tortures were inflicted even more horrible than the above named.” — See Claude’s Complaints.
