Persecutions of the Huguenots.
At Meaux, the birthplace of reform, fourteen persons were burned alive in the market-place. In the south of France two Protestant towns, Cabrières and Merindol, were razed to the ground; every house was destroyed, and the unoffending people were murdered in the streets. Four or five hundred women and children, who had taken refuge in a church, were butchered at once; twenty-five women, who had hidden in a cave, were smothered by a fire kindled at its entrance by the papal legate. At Paris, on the night of Sept. 4, 1537, a congregation of Protestants were gathered in secret at a private house in the suburbs. Many of them were refined and pious men and women from the cultivated classes of society; some were noble and connected with the court. But, united by a common piety, they celebrated the communion and listened to the exhortations of a faithful pastor. They were startled by the cry, outside the door, of “Death to the Lutherans!” A wild mob of papists surrounded the house and besieged all night the terrified women, who were guarded alone by the swords of the gentlemen who attended them. In the morning the police arrested the whole Huguenot congregation and dragged them through the streets to the filthy dungeons of the Châtelet, where they had room neither to lie nor sit down. By the strict law their lives were forfeited. They were offered pardon if they would go to mass. But not one consented. A long and terrible imprisonment passed away before they were brought to trial. Among the captives, the fate of Philippa de Lunz—a refined and high-bred woman, only twenty-two years old; a widow, possessed of wealth and influence—is singularly illustrative of the papal theories. She was examined, and refused to recant. She was next led out for execution. In the gay city of Paris, in September, 1558, a throng of papists assembled around a pile of fagots in the Place Maubert, dancing, singing, and calling for the victims. The king, it is said, looked on from a distance; the courtiers were not far off; the priests were, no doubt, all present. At length a cart drove into the square, on which were seen Philippa and two Huguenot companions. Their tongues had already been cut out. But Philippa had laid aside her widow's weeds, and was dressed in her best attire. For she said, on leaving prison, “Why should not I rejoice? I am going to meet my husband.” She witnessed the horrible convulsions of her two friends as they expired amidst the flames. She was lost in fervent prayer. The executioners roughly seized her, tore off her outer dress, and held her, with her head downward, in the fire. Her feet had already been burned off. She was then strangled. Several others of the prisoners were executed But their fate now awakened the attention of Europe. Calvin wrote to the survivors a letter of encouragement; at his entreaty the princes of Germany interceded for them. The younger prisoners were carried to monasteries, from whence they were afterward allowed to escape; others were pardoned upon making an apparent recantation; and it is possible that even the French king and court were satisfied with the woes already inflicted upon the pious congregation of Paris. But the pope was enraged at the lenity shown to the Huguenots, and denounced the faint trace of toleration on the part of the king. He complained, he remonstrated. He was discontented because every prisoner had not been hung with his head downward in the flames, and strangled, like Philippa de Lunz. I have sketched the fate of the Protestants of Paris as an illustration of the Roman doctrine of employing force in preserving religious unity. The popes and the Italian priests still defend that theory of persecution by which Philippa de Lunz was strangled; by which every country of Europe has been filled with woe; by which, if honestly accepted, every devout Roman Catholic might be converted into an assassin. Silenced and overpowered, their congregations broken up, their pastors driven from France, the Huguenots still expressed their religious impulses by a singular expedient. Music came to their aid. Clement Marot translated the Psalms of David into French verse, and soon the inspired songs of the Jewish king were chanted in every city of the realm. They resounded in plaintive melodies from the caves and forests where the Huguenots still ventured to assemble; they made their way into the palace and the castle; and Francis, Henry II., Catherine de’ Medici, and Henry of Navarre, had each a favorite psalm. Catherine, with some propriety, selected, “O Lord, rebuke me not;” Diana of Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II., delighted in the De Profundis. The Huguenots sung the psalms as a substitute for divine worship, and often, as throngs of Parisians were walking on summer evenings in the pleasure-grounds of Pré aux Clercs, some daring reformer would strike the key-note of a psalm of Marot, and the strain, caught up by innumerable voices, would swell over the gay assemblage. The king and queen of Navarre often went to the fashionable walk to hear the singing. But the priests at length procured an edict forbidding the practice, and the voice of sacred melody was finally hushed in the horrors of St. Bartholomew.—Historical Studies.