mpromise, wielding the weapons of the church to
enforce the pious duty of exterminating every foul calumny invented to the
disadvantage of the reformers. No wonder, then, that the ecclesiastical
dress itself became the badge of deadly and irreconcilable hostility, and
that in the course of this unhappy war many a priest was cut down without
any examination into his private views or personal history. Parliament,
too, was setting the example of cruelty by reckless orders amounting
almost to independent legislation. By a series of "arrets" succeeding each
other rapidly in the months of June and July, the door was opened wider
and wider for popular excess. When the churches of Meaux were visited by
an iconoclastic rabble on the twenty-sixth of June, the Parisian
parliament, on the thirtieth of June, employed the disorder as the pretext
of a judicial "declaration" that made the culprits liable to all the
penalties of treason, and permitted any one to put them to death without
further authorization. The populace of Paris needed no fuller powers to
attack the Huguenots, for, within two or three days, sixty men and women
had been killed, robbed, and thrown into the river. Parliament, therefore,
found it convenient to terminate the massacre by a second order
restricting the application of the declaration to persons taken in the
very act.[150] A few days later (July, 1562), other arrets empowered all
inhabitants of towns and villages to take up arms against those who
molested priests, sacked churches, or "held conventicles and unlawful
assemblies," whether public or secret; and to arrest the ministers,
deacons, and other ecclesiastical functionaries for trial, as guilty of
treason against God as well as man.[151] Not content with these appeals to
popular passion,[152] however, the Parisian judges soon gave practical
exemplifications of their intolerant principles; for two royal
officers--the "lieutenant general" of Pontoise, and the "lieutenant" of
Senlis--were publicly hung; the former for encouraging the preaching of
God's word "in other form than the ancient church" authorized, the latter
for "celebrating the Lord's Supper according to the Genevese fashion."
These were, according to the curate of St. Barthelemi, the first
executions at Paris for the simple profession of "Huguenoterie" since the
pardon proclaimed by Francis the Second at Amboise.[153] A few days
later, a new and more explicit declaration pronounced all those who h