by Will Durant
Amid these battles for the Lord, Calvin continued to live simply, and to rule Geneva by the power of a personality armed with the delusions of his followers. His position became stronger as years gave it roots. His only weakness was physical; headaches, asthma, dyspepsia, stone, gout, and fever racked and thinned his frame, and formed his face to taut severity and gloom. A long illness in 1558–59 left him lame and feeble, with repeated hemorrhages of the lungs. Thereafter he had to keep to his bed most of the time, though he continued to study, direct, and preach, even when he had to be borne to the sanctuary in a chair. On April 25, 1564, he made his will, full of confidence in his election to everlasting glory. On the twenty-sixth the syndics and the Council came to his bedside; he asked their pardon for his outbreaks of anger, and begged them to hold steadfastly to the pure doctrine of the Reformed Church. Farel, now in his eightieth year, came from Neuchâtel to bid him au revoir. After many days of prayer and suffering Calvin found peace (May 27, 1564).
His influence was even greater than Luther’s, but he walked in a path that Luther had cleared. Luther had protected his new church by rallying German nationalism to its support; the move was necessary, but it tied Lutheranism too narrowly to Teutonic stocks. Calvin loved France, and labored to promote the Huguenot cause, but he was no nationalist; religion was his country; and so his doctrine, however modified, inspired the Protestantism of Switzerland, France, Scotland, and America, and captured large sectors of Protestantism in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Holland, and England. Calvin gave to Protestantism in many lands an organization, confidence, and pride that enabled it to survive a thousand trials.
A year before his death his pupil Olevianus joined with Melanchthon’s pupil Ursinus in preparing the Heidelberg Catechism, which became the accepted expression of the Reformed faith in Germany and Holland. Bèze and Bullinger reconciled the creeds of Calvin and Zwingli in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), which became authoritative for the Reformed churches in Switzerland and France. In Geneva itself Calvin’s work was ably continued by Bèze. But year by year the business leaders who controlled the Councils resisted more and more successfully the attempts of the Consistory and the Venerable Company to place moral checks upon economic operations. After Bèze’s death (1608) the merchant princes consolidated their supremacy, and the Genevan Church lost the directive privileges that Calvin had won for it in nonreligious affairs. In the eighteenth century the influence of Voltaire moderated the Calvinist tradition, and ended the sway of a puritan ethic among the people. Catholicism patiently struggled to recapture a place in the city; it offered a Christianity without gloom and an ethic without severity; in 1954 the population was 42 per cent Catholic, 47 per cent Protestant.79 But the most impressive man-made structure in Geneva is the noble “Reformation Monument” which, running majestically along a park wall, celebrates the victories of Protestantism, and raises at its center the powerful figures of Farel, Calvin, Bèze, and Knox,
Meanwhile the hard theocracy of Calvin was sprouting democratic buds. The efforts of the Calvinist leaders to give schooling to all, and their inculcation of disciplined character, helped the sturdy burghers of Holland to oust the alien dictatorship of Spain, and supported the revolt of nobles and clergy in Scotland against a fascinating but imperious queen. The stoicism of a hard creed made the strong souls of the Scottish Covenanters, the English and Dutch Puritans, the Pilgrims of New England. It steadied the heart of Cromwell, guided the pen of blind Milton, and broke the power of the backward-facing Stuarts. It encouraged brave and ruthless men to win a continent and spread the base of education and self-government until all men could be free. Men who chose their own pastors soon claimed to choose their governors, and the self-ruled congregation became the self-governed municipality. The myth of divine election justified itself in the making of America.
When this function had been performed, the theory of predestination fell into the backwaters of Protestant belief. As social order returned in Europe after the Thirty Years’ War, in England after the revolutions of 1642 and 1689, in America after 1793, the pride of divine election changed into the pride of work and accomplishment; men felt stronger and more secure; fear lessened, and the frightened cruelty that had generated Calvin’s God gave way to a more humane vision that compelled a reconception of deity. Decade by decade the churches that had taken their lead from Calvin discarded the harsher elements of his creed. Theologians dared to believe that all who died in infancy were saved, and one respected divine announced, without causing a commotion, that “the number of the finally lost... will be very inconsiderable.” 80 We are grateful to be so reassured, and we will agree that even error lives because it serves some vital need. But we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.
CHAPTER XXII
Francis I and the Reformation in France
1515–59
I. LE ROI GRAND NEZ
HE was born under a tree in Cognac on September 12, 1494. His grandfather was Charles of Orléans, the poet; perhaps song and the love of beauty were in his blood. His father was Charles of Valois and Orléans, Count of Angoulême, who died, after many adulteries, in the third year of Francis’ life. His mother was Louise of Savoy, a woman of beauty, ability, and ambition, with a taste for wealth and power. Widowed at seventeen, she refused the hand of Henry VII of England, and devoted herself—barring some liaisons—to making her son king of France. She did not mourn when Anne of Brittany, second wife of Louis XII, had a stillborn son, leaving Francis heir to the throne. Louis sadly made Francis Duke of Valois, and appointed tutors to instruct him in the art of royalty. Louise and his sister Marguerite mothered him to idolatry, and prepared him to be a ladies’ king. Louise called him Mon roi, mon seigneur, mon César, fed him chivalric romances, gloried in his gallantries, and swooned at the blows he received in the jousts that he loved. He was handsome, gay, courteous, brave; he met dangers like a Roland or an Amadis; when a wild boar, escaping from its cage, sought to frolic in his princely court, it was Francis who, while others fled, faced the beast and slew it splendidly.
At the age of twelve (1506) he was betrothed to Claude of France, the seven-year-old daughter of Louis XII. She had been promised to the boy who was to become the Emperor Charles V; the engagement had been broken to avoid yoking France to Spain; this was one item in a hundred irritations that urged Hapsburg and Valois into conflict from youth to death. At fourteen Francis was bidden leave his mother and join Louis at Chinon. At twenty he married Claude. She was stout and dull, lame and fertile and good; she gave him children in 1515, 1516, 1518, 1520, 1522, 1523, and died in 1524.
Meanwhile he became king (January 1, 1515). Everybody was happy, above all his mother, to whom he gave the duchies of Angoulême and Anjou, the counties of Maine and Beaufort, the barony of Amboise. But he was generous to others too—to nobles, artists, poets, pages, mistresses. His pleasant voice, his cordiality and good temper, his vivacity and charm, his living synthesis of chivalry and the Renaissance, endeared him to his country, even to his court. France rejoiced, and placed high hopes in him, as England in those years in Henry VIII, and the Empire in Charles V; the world seemed young again, so freshened with royal youth. And Francis, even more than Leo X, was resolved to enjoy his throne.
What was he really, this Arthur plus Lancelot? Physically he would have been magnificent, had not his nose been more so; irreverent contemporaries called him le roi grand nez. He was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, agile, strong; he could run, jump, wrestle, fence with the best; he could wield a two-handed sword or a heavy lance. His thin beard and mustache did not disguise his youth; he was twenty-one when crowned. His narrow eyes suggested alertness and humor, but not subtlety or depth. If his nose betokened virility it conformed to his reputation. Brantôme, whose Dames Galantes cannot be taken as history, wrote therein that “King Francis loved greatly and too much; for being young and fre
e, he embraced now one, now another, with indifference... from which he took the grande vérole that shortened his days.”1 The King’s mother was reported to have said that he was punished where he had sinned.* Perhaps history has exaggerated the variety of his amours. Whatever their number, he remained outwardly faithful first to Françoise de Foix, Comtesse de Chateaubriand, then, from 1526 to his death, to Anne de Pisselieu, whom he made Duchesse d’Étampes. Gossip spread a hundred romantic tales about him—that he besieged Milan not for Milan but for a pair of unforgettable eyes that he had seen there,3 or that a siren in Pavia lured him to his central tragedy.4 In any case we may have some sympathy for so sensitive a king. He was capable of tenderness as well as infatuation: when he proposed to divorce his son from the persistently barren Catherine de Médicis, her tears dissuaded him.5 “Nothing can be imagined more humane than Francis,” said Erasmus;6 and if that was the pathos of distance, Budé, France’s own humanist, described him as “gentle and accessible.”7
He was vain even for a man. He rivaled Henry VIII in the splendor of his royal robes, and in the furry insouciance of his beret. He took the salamander as his symbol, betokening persistent resurrection from every conflagration, but life scorched him none the less. He loved honors, distinctions, adulation, and could not bear criticism. He had an actor whipped for satirizing the court; Louis XII, bitten by the same wit, had merely smiled.8 He could be ungrateful, as to Anne de Montmorency, unfair, as to Charles of Bourbon, cruel, as to Semblançay; but by and large he was forgiving and generous; Italians marveled at his liberality.9 No ruler in history was kinder to artists. He loved beauty intensely and intelligently, and spent almost as readily on art as on war; he was half the purse of the French Renaissance.
His intellectual ability did not equal his charm of character. He had little Latin and no Greek, but astonished many men by the variety and accuracy of his knowledge in agriculture, hunting, geography, military science, literature, and art; and he enjoyed philosophy when it did not interfere with love or war. He was too reckless and impetuous to be a great commander, too lighthearted and fond of pleasure to be a great statesman, too fascinated by appearances to get to essences, too amiably influenced by favorites and mistresses to choose the best available generals and ministers, too open and frank to be a competent diplomat. His sister Marguerite grieved over his incapacity for government, and foresaw that the subtle but inflexible Emperor would unhorse him in their lifelong joust. Louis XII, who admired him as “a fine young gallant,” saw with foreboding the lavish hedonism of his successor. “All our work is useless,” he said; “this great boy will spoil everything.”10
II. FRANCE IN 1515
France was now enjoying the prosperity engendered by a bountiful soil, a skillful and thrifty people, and a beneficent reign. The population was some 16,000,000, compared with 3,000,000 in England and 7,000,000 in Spain. Paris, with 300,000, was the largest city in Europe after Constantinople. The social structure was semi-feudal: nearly all the peasants owned the land they tilled, but usually they held it in fief—and owed dues or services—to seigneurs and chevaliers whose function was to organize agriculture and provide military protection to their locality and the nation. Inflation, caused by the repeated debasement of coinages and the mining or import of precious metals, eased the traditional money dues, and enabled peasants to buy land cheaply from the land-rich, money-poor nobility; hence a rural prosperity that kept the French peasant merry and Catholic while the German Bauer was making economic and religious revolution. Stimulated by ownership, French energy drew from the soil the best corn and wine in Europe; cattle grew fat and multiplied; milk, butter, and cheese were on every table; chickens or other fowl were in almost every yard; and the peasant accepted the odor of his pigsty as one of the blessed fragrances of life.
The town worker—still chiefly a craftsman in his own shop—did not share proportionately in this prosperity. Inflation raised prices faster than wages, and protective tariffs and royal monopolies, as of salt, helped to keep the cost of living high. Discontented workers went on strike, but were nearly always defeated; and the law forbade workingmen to unite for economic purposes. Commerce moved leisurely along the bountiful rivers, but painfully along the poor roads, paying each lord a toll to pass through his domain Lyons, where the trade of the Mediterranean, ascending the Rhone, met the flow of goods from Switzerland and Germany, was second only to Paris in French industry, and only to Antwerp as a bourse or center of investment and finance. From Marseilles French commerce roamed the Mediterranean, and profited from the friendly relations that Francis dared to maintain with Suleiman and the Turks.
From this economy Francis, after the fashion of governments, drew revenues to the limit of tolerance. The taille (cut) fell as a personal or property tax upon all but nobles and clergy; the clergy paid the King ecclesiastical tithes and grants, the nobles supplied and equipped the cavalry that was still the flamboyant mainstay of French arms. Taking a lesson from the popes, Francis sold—and created to sell—noble titles and political offices; in this way the nouveaux riches slowly formed (as in England) a new aristocracy, and the lawyers, buying offices, established a powerful bureaucracy that—sometimes over the head of the King—administered the government of France.
The King’s pleasures did not allow him much time for government. He delegated its tasks, even the formation of its policies, to men like Admiral Bonnivet, Anne de Montmorency, Cardinals Duprat and de Tournon, and the Vicomte de Lautrec. Three councils aided and advised these men and the King: a Privy Council of Nobles, a more intimate Council of Affairs, and a Grand Council that handled appeals to the King. Except for this, the Parlement of Paris, composed of some 200 secular or ecclesiastical members appointed for life by the King, served as a supreme court. It had the right to remonstrate with him when it thought that his edicts contravened the fundamental institutions of France; and his decrees lacked the full prestige of law until “registered”—in effect ratified—by this ancient corps. Dominated by lawyers and old men, the Parlement of Paris became the national political organ of the middle classes, and—next to the Sorbonne—the most conservative organization in France. Local parlements, and governors appointed by the King, administered the provinces. The States-General was for the time being ignored; the collection of taxes replaced grants-in-aid, and the role of the nobility in government declined.
The function of the nobles was twofold: to organize the army, and to serve the King at court. The court, consisting of the administrative heads, the leading nobles, their wives, and the family and favorites of the King, now became the head and front of France, the mirror of fashion, the mobile perpetual festival of royalty. At the summit of this whirl was the Master of the King’s Household, who organized the whole and patrolled the protocol; then the Chamberlain, who had charge of the royal bedchamber; then four Gentlemen of the Bedchamber or First Lords in Waiting, who were always at the King’s elbow to wait on his desires; these men were changed every three months, to give other notables a turn at this exhilarating intimacy; lest anyone be overlooked, there were twenty to fifty-four Lords of the Bedchamber to serve the highest four; add twelve Pages of the Bedchamber a id four Ushers of the Bedchamber, and the King’s sleeping quarters were adequately cared for. Twenty lords served as stewards of the King’s cuisine, managing a staff of forty-five men and twenty-five cupbearers. Some thirty enfants d’honneur—boys of awesome pedigree—functioned as royal pages, shining in silvered livery; and a host of secretaries multiplied the hand and memory of the King. A cardinal was Grand Chaplain of the royal chapel; a bishop was Master of the Oratory or prayer service; and fifty diocesan bishops were allowed to grace the court and so augment their fame. Honorary positions as “grooms of the chamber,” with pensions of 240 livres, were awarded for divers accomplishments, as to scholars like Budé and poets like Marot. We must not forget seven physicians, seven surgeons four barbers, seven choristers, eight craftsmen, eight clerks of the kitchen, eight ushers for the audience chamber. E
ach of the King’s sons had his own attendants—stewards, chancellors, tutors, pages, and servants. Each of the two queens at court—Claude and Marguerite—had her retinue of fifteen or ten ladies in waiting, sixteen or eight maids of honor—filles demoiselles. It was the most characteristic distinction of Francis that he raised women to high place at his court, winked expertly at their liaisons, encouraged and enjoyed their parade of finery and soft charms. “A court without ladies,” he said, “is a garden without flowers”;11 and probably it was the women—dowered with the ageless beauty of art—who gave the court of Francis I a graceful splendor and gay stimulus unequaled even in the palaces of Imperial Rome. All the potentates of Europe taxed their peoples to provide some minor mirroring of this Parisian fantasy.
Beneath the polished surface was an immense base of servantry: four chefs, six assistant chefs, cooks specializing in soups or sauces or pastries or roasts, and a countless personnel to supply and serve the King’s table, the cuisine commune of the court, and the needs and comforts of ladies and gentlemen. There were court musicians, led by the most notable singers, composers, and instrumentalists in Europe outside of Rome. A Master of the Horse, twenty-five noble equerries, and a swarm of coachmen and grooms attended the royal stables. There were Masters of the Hunt, a hundred dogs, and 300 falcons—trained and cared for by a hundred falconers under a Grand Falconer. Four hundred archers formed the King’s bodyguard, and brightened the court with their colorful costumes.
For court banquets, balls, marriages, and diplomatic receptions no one building in Paris sufficed. The Louvre was then a gloomy fortress; Francis abandoned it for the assorted palaces known as Les Tournelles (The Little Towers) near the Bastille, or for the spacious palace where the Parlement had been wont to sit; better still, loving to hunt, he moved out to Fontainebleau, or down to his châteaux along the Loire at Blois, Chambord, Amboise, or Tours—dragging half the court and wealth of France with him. Cellini, with his wonted hyperbole, described his royal patron as traveling with a retinue of 18,000 persons and 12,000 horses.12 Foreign ambassadors protested the cost and weariness of catching or keeping up with the King; and when they found him he was, as like as not, in bed till noon, recovering from the pleasures of the night before, or busy preparing a hunt or a tournament. The cost of all this perambulating glory was enormous. The treasury was always near bankruptcy, taxes were forever mounting, the bankers of Lyons were dragooned into risky royal loans. In 1523, perceiving that his expenditures were losing sight of his revenues, the King promised to put a limit on his personal indulgences, “not including, however, the ordinary run of our little necessities and pleasures.” 13 He excused his extravagance as needed to impress envoys, overwhelm ambitious nobles, and please the populace; the Parisians, he thought, hungered for spectacles, and admired rather than resented the splendor of their King.