CAMEO Peter's Reform. 1780. laymen, above the rank of serfs, should shave and wear European dresses, under pain of a heavy fine. Coats as patterns were hung at the gates of the cities, and there was sore lamentation. Some consulted the clergy as to what they should do, saying that they would as soon lose their heads as their beards; but on a representation that the beard grows again, but the head does not, they yielded most reluctantly. IF the English were murmuring at the Spanish war, their old enemy France was weakened by another civil war, or rather insurrection, the last of the sparks left by the great religious wars of the former century. Louis fancied that orthodoxy meant persecution, and the Peace of Ryswick had only brought heavier troubles upon the Huguenots who had not migrated beyond his power. Zealous Roman Catholics themselves remonstrated against his severity. The Cardinal Archbishop de Noailles of Paris exhorted the King to enforce more Christian measures, so did the Duke of Beauvilliers, and on political and economical grounds, so did Marshal Catinat; but Louis was not to be persuaded, and continued to believe it his duty to extirpate, where he could not convert, the remnant of the Reformed. The Intendants of the provinces acting for the Governors had almost unlimited power. One of the most severe was Lamoignon de Bâville, called "the King of Languedoc," which he ruled for three and thirty years; calm, methodical, and as devoid of pity as if he had been made of iron, when there was a question of implicit submission. If he fell upon an assembly of Huguenots, the outermost were shot down, the more distinguished were hung on the trees, the others sent to the galleys. Two thousand Protestants rowed the war-ships of France. It is a remarkable fact that in naval encounters, victory was almost uniformly against the slave-rowed ships, though they might have seemed to have every advantage. Some of the clergy were almost, if not quite, as ferocious as the soldiery, in especial the Archpriest and Inspector of Missions, the Abbé de Chayla, who had fortified his abode at Pont de Montvert, and there employed tortures on his victims. Sometimes he had their eyebrows CAMEO Persecution of Hugue nots. 1700. CAMEO XVIII. 1702. and beard tweaked out by pincers, sometimes their hands were forced to close upon burning coals, sometimes greased or oiled cotton was Rising in the fastened between their fingers, and then set on fire, burning them to Cevennes. the bone. Excitement and misery produced an exaltation of spirit among these sufferers, most of them of the degree of farmers, uneducated, except in the Bible. One man at Codognan declared that he had heard a voice crying, "Go and comfort my people.' Shepherds in Béarn thought they heard Psalms chanted in the air. Isabeau Vincent, the Shepherdess of Dauphiné, who could neither read nor write, began at first in patois, afterwards in French, to utter prayers full of inspiration, and wonderful revelations were rejoicing the hearts and poured forth by the tongues of this afflicted people—increasing their enthusiasm, and further increasing the animosity, both conscientious and vindictive, of their foes. Three hundred young people were imprisoned at Uzés on this account by Bâville, and afterwards sent to the galleys; but the spirit of martyrdom was only fostered by persecution, and as the troops began to be drawn off for the Spanish War, it became the spirit of revolt. On the 27th of July, 1702, tidings were received that at Pont de Montvert, the Abbé de Chayla had shut up a whole company of Huguenots and put them in fetters, among them two young ladies of rank. At ten o'clock at night, fifty determined men, singing a Psalm, surrounded the house, demanding the prisoners, and on the Archpriest's refusal, the doors were broken in, and a shot, which killed one of the assailants, excited their fury, as well as finding the captives bruised, swollen, showing marks of cruelty, and unable to stand. The house was set on fire, and as the priests rushed out they were killed. quarter, no quarter," was the maddened cry. The Archpriest tried letting himself down from a window, but the cord gave way, and he was found in a bush with a broken thigh. The enthusiasts thought they had Divine direction, and each passed by and struck with a dagger. "Here's for my father broken on the wheel!" "Here's for my brother at the galleys!" "Here's for my mother's death from grief!" Such were the cries, as the miserable man expired under fifty-two wounds. The next morning all the Cévennes was in arms. It is the moorland of Languedoc, the skirts and offshoots of the mountains of Auvergne, inhabited by a sturdy but vehement race, and always a last stronghold. There had Julius Cæsar met his most determined enemies, there had been a retreat of the Christians under persecution, the Franks had never conquered it, the Albigenses had taken refuge there, and the Huguenot inhabitants had endured more than twenty years of persecution, before, goaded by cruelty and inflamed by fanatics, they burst into open revolt. Bands of from forty to fifty men, shepherds, farmers, peasants, armed chiefly with axes, ploughshares, and wads, gathered together, and found hiding-places and food in the chestnut woods. Their first leaders were Roland, an old soldier, Laporte, and Castanet, and they eluded the search of Bâville and his brother-in-law, the Count de Broglie. Vengeance fell on the peasantry who were supposed to give them "No warning. In Alais alone there were sixty-two executions of Huguenots in a few weeks, and Bâville obtained a decree putting the district under a sort of martial law. Sequier, a leader, was captured. "How wouldst thou be treated?" asked his judge. "As I would treat thee," he answered; and he was burnt at Pont de Montvert in the market place, shouting words of encouragement from the flames. There was little mercy on the part of these Huguenots, they slaughtered priests and monks, and burnt their prisons; indeed their popular name Camisard is said to come from Camas-ard, a house burning, whence their attacks were called Camisards. The bands began to gather together into something like an army, and there came to the front a handsome spirited young man of one and twenty, named Jean Cavalier, who was a native of Anduse, but had spent some months as a baker at Geneva, and had there acquired a slight knowledge of military matters, which his wonderful talents made available against the troops raised against them, at first only a sort of provincial militia, from whom they took weapons and arms. Cruel reprisals they thought permissible, and even sanctified by the example of Israel of old. Otherwise all was piety. The Insurgents called themselves the Children of God, the Lord's flock. They kept up strict religious habits, permitting no licence, drunkenness, nor oaths, and all was on an equality, with provisions in common. Their stores and hospitals were in caverns, their arms and ammunition were only what they could capture, and their bullets were made by the melting down of church-bells. There was daily preaching and prayer, and on Sunday, ministers and prophets in turn mounted some rock, and discoursed all day to their camp and the people of the villages. There were never more than ten thousand of the fighting men, but they were in close connection with all the peasantry, who warned them of any approach of the enemy, and they could disperse and unite in the most baffling manner, falling on the enemy with the war-cry of Israel, "Let God arise and His enemies be scattered!" The Count de Broglie was recalled, and the Court perceived that it The Catholics were invited into the CAMEO XVIII. The Camisards. 1702. CAMEO XVIII. Camisard War. 1703. 1703, Montrevel was informed of a meeting for worship in a mill near Nismes. He took a troop thither, found 150 persons in it, many aged men, women, and children. He set fire to it, and had the congregation driven back into the flames. Only one girl was allowed to escape by the pity of a servant of the Marshal, but she was hanged the next day, and the servant would have shared her fate but for the intercession of some nuns. To his regular troops, Montrevel added companies of volunteers, who called themselves Cadets of the Cross, or White Camisards, in opposition to the insurgents who were known as Black Camisards. Clement XI. actually gave them a bull of indulgence, for their endeavours to exterminate the accursed race sprung from the Albigenses; but these soon proved themselves mere plunderers, as savage and rapacious towards the Catholics as towards the Huguenots, and had to be disbanded. It was a frightful war on both sides. Troops of 300 or 400 Camisards would suddenly burst out of a wood or from a moor, fall on a little town, a village, or château, and often burn it, and put every one in it to the sword. On the other hand the relations of the armed men were, when captured, thrown into prison, and then tortured and broken on the wheel, and the country being left a desert, starvation was adding to the general misery. Cavalier's genius, and the courage of despair, actually enabled the Camisards to gain four victories over detachments of Montrevel's in the course of the winter. The state of Languedoc could no longer be concealed from Louis XIV., and the politicians were reminded that if an English or Dutch fleet attempted a landing in the south, the Protestants of the whole district might rise. It was decided to recall Montrevel and send Villars to take the command. This Marshal had already made up his mind that barbarity only made the Camisards desperate, and he therefore began by entreating the permission of the King to use milder means. "I trust to you," said Louis. "You can well believe that I prefer the preservation of my people to their destruction, which is certain if this unhappy revolt lasts." The mildness did not include mercy to men taken in arms, nor any hope of their religion being tolerated; but those who surrendered were to be allowed life and liberty, either to leave the kingdom, or to live at home under the guarantee of Catholic neighbours. Villars was far superior in abilities as a general to his predecessor, and he succeeded in so cutting off the supplies, that Cavalier, after being two days without food for himself or his army, wrote to him. Villars replied, giving him hopes and relaxing his watch, so that assemblies for worship again were held at Calvisson. An interview took place between the Marshal and the former baker's boy at Nismes, in the garden of the Recollet friars, outside the gates. Villars was much struck with his antagonist. "He is a peasant of the lowest rank," he wrote to the Minister-at-war, not twenty-two years old, and looking eighteen, small and of no imposing appearance, but of | surprising firmness and good sense. He has excellent combinations for 66 |