The Power Of The Popes Part 18

and Leopold, did not check tbe progress of heresy. After tbe despotism of-Ferdinand II. had disgusted the Germans and the North of Europe, we behold the imperial authority decline in the hands of Ferdinand III.; and Leopold, ruled for forty-seven years by his ministers, women, and confessors, the useless friend of the popes, supported himself only by the idea he inspired of his weakness.

After Henry IV. who was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1610, the seventeenth century presents us with but two kings of France, Louis XIII. and Louis XIV.

Louis XIII. banished Mary de Medicis his mother, recalled her, and banished her once more; he insults her because he fears her: he does not esteem Rich-lieu whom he receives as minister and as master. The Protestants, always restless and menaced, take arms; Roch.e.l.le, their bulwark, capitulates after a long siege. Richlieu publishes an act of grace: he is too fearful of Rome and the children of Loyala, to crush as yet the followers of Calvin. He is more desirous of humbling the great; and terrifies them by the executions of Marillac, of Montmorency, and of Cinq-Mars; and, finis.h.i.+ng by unworthy means what Henry IV. had not time to perfect, he established in the interior of France the monarchical power. His death, and that of Louis XIII. led to a stormy minority: the Fronde repulsed Mazarin; Mazarin wearied out the Fronde, and applied himself to ruling carelessly a frivolous people. What he most neglected was the education of the young king, that Louis XIV. who, from 1661 to 1716 reigned over the French, and for awhile gave law to Europe. The revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, divides this long reign into two parts: good services, and triumphs, immortalize the first: hypocrisy, fanatacism, vain glory, and misfortunes, filled the latter with intrigues, proscriptions, and slow calamities. Yet, whatever may have been the misfortunes of Louis XIV. the most glorious recollections of French history under its third dynasty belong to his reign. The nation whose pride he cherished pardoned the excesses of his; and so many of those who surrounded him merited the appellation of just, that he has obtained it himself; other princes on the contrary reflect their personal greatness on that which surrounds them. But his imposing authority for a long time repressed the ambition of the popes; and the influence which they exerted over the latter period of his reign, has tended much more to injure France than to benefit the Roman Court.

Richlieu rejected the prayers of Urban VIII. who, in his letters to Louis XIII., to the queen, and to Richlieu himself, ceased not to recommend the complete extermination of the Huguenots.

"Caeterum, c.u.m scias qua cura custodiendi sint victoriarum fructus, ne marcescant, nemo est qui ambigat a te reliquis omnes haereticorum in Gallica vinea stabulantium propediem profligatum iri." Urb. VIII. Epis, ad principes, ann. 6. f. 10. Aux. Arch. of the Empire.

The wars of the Venetians against the Turks, the conspiracy of the Spaniards against Venice, in 1618, the sedition of Mazaniello in Naples, in 1640, and the enterprizes of some of the Roman pontiffs, are in this century the princ.i.p.al events in the annals of Italy. Never was the country more disposed to bear and to extend the dominion of the popes: but the popes failed in the address necessary to draw the full advantage from this disposition: they suffered the fine arts to languish and decay about them, while they grew and flourished elsewhere: in this century the Italians ceased to be the most enlightened people of Europe, a preeminence which they needed, to preserve any share of it, and not suffer themselves to be reduced in all respects to a state of inferiority.

The most remarkable popes of the seventeenth century were Paul V. Urban VIII. Innocent X. Alexander VII. Clement IX. Innocent XI. Alexander VIII. and Innocent XII.

The republic of Venice had punished with death, without the intervention of the ecclesiastical authority, an Augustine monk convicted of enormous crimes; a canon and an abbot were imprisoned for similar reasons; the senate forbad the encrease, without its permission, either of convents or churches; it prohibited the alienation of lands for the benefit of monks or of the clergy. These acts of independence irritated Paul V.; he excommunicated the doge and the senators, and laid an interdict on the whole republic. He required that within twenty four days the senators, revoking their decrees, should deliver into the hands of the nuncio, the canon and the abbot they had imprisoned. If, after the twenty-four days, the doge and senators persisted in their refusal for three days, the divine functions were to cease, not only in Venice, but through all the Venetian dominions; and, it was enjoined on all patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, vicars-general, and others, under pun of suspension, and deprivation of their revenues, to publish and affix in the churches this pontifical decree, which Paul p.r.o.nounced, as he said, by the authority of G.o.d, the apostles, and his own. The Capuchins, the Theatins, and the Jesuits, obeyed the interdict, which was disregarded by the rest of the Venetian clergy as it was by the people. Little attention was paid to the Theatins and Capuchins; but the Jesuits, more powerful and more culpable, were banished for ever. A protest against the anathemas of Paul was addressed by the doge to the prelates and clergy; and the senate wrote on the same head to all the cities and communes of the state. These two pieces are distinguished for their calm energy, which mingles no insult, no indication of pa.s.sion, with the expression of unshaken resolution. We have omitted nothing, say the senators, to open the eyes of his holiness; but he has closed his ear to our remonstrances, as well as to the lessons of Scripture, of the holy fathers and of councils; he perseveres in not acknowleging the secular authority which G.o.d has committed to us, the independence of our republic, and the rights of our fellow-citizens. Shall we appeal to a general council? our ancestors have done it in similar circ.u.mstances; but here the injustice is so palpable that a solemn appeal would be superfluous. Our cause is too immediately that of our subjects, of our allies, of our enemies themselves, that such an excommunication should disturb for a moment the external or internal peace of our republic.

In fact, the anathema remained inefficacious within and without. In vain did the pope employ the Jesuits to raise or indispose the European courts against the Venetians. In Spain even, where these Jesuitical intrigues were somewhat more successful than elsewhere, the Venetian amba.s.sador was admitted to all the ecclesiastical ceremonies, in spite of the threats of the nuncio. The governor of Milan, the dukes of Mantua and Modena, the grand duke of Tuscany, the viceroy of Naples, openly espoused the interests of the excommunicated republic. Sigismund, king of Poland, also declared that it was the cause of his kingdom; and the duke of Savoy, that it was that of every sovereign in Christendom. The court of Vienna blamed the pope's conduct, and invited Sorance, the Venetian amba.s.sador, to a procession of the holy sacrament, in despite of the apostolic nuncio, who refused to be present at it. The nuncio Barberini did not succeed better in France when he required that entrance into the churches should be prohibited the Venetian amba.s.sador.

Priuli. Abandoned thus at all the courts, and reduced to his own spiritual and temporal resources, the sovereign pontiff resolved to levy troops against Venice: happily for this papal army, Henry IV. offered his mediation, and ended the dispute,4 on terms more favourable than Paul could have hoped for, although he had formed a 'board of war:' it was in truth a committee of priests, and a perfectly novel application of sacerdotal functions.

The court of Rome, says Dumarsais, fears only those who do not fear her, and concedes only to those who will not concede to her; she has no power but that derived from the weakness of those who are ignorant of their own rights, and who ascribe to her, what she would never have dared to attribute to herself but for their blind deference.-Exp. of the Doctrine of the Gallican Church, v. 228 of 7th vol. of Dumariais' Works.

4 Bossuet. Def. Cler. Gall. 1. 4, c. 12.

Paul V. conspired to disturb England also, by two briefs, in which he forbade the catholics to take the oath of allegiance to their king James I: he renewed the bull 'In caena Domini,' and inserted it in the Roman ritual, accompanied by a surplusage of anathemas.5 The pretensions of this pope gave rise to many publications on the pontifical power. The 8th of June, 1610, twenty-four days after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Henry IV.

the parliament of Paris condemned to the flames a book in which the Jesuit Mariana permitted, nay advised, the attempting the lives of intractable kings. The 28th of November following, justice was done the treatise in which Bellarmin extends over the temporalities of princes the spiritual power of the popes.6

5 'Pastoralis Romani pontificis vigilantia,' such are the words of the bull 'In caena Domini,' renewed by Paul; it has thirty articles, that is, six more than the bull 'Consuevernnt' of Paul III.

6 Bossuet. Def. Cler. Gall. 1. 4, c. 16.

In 1614 the same parliament consigned to the flames a book, equally seditious, of the Jesuit Suarez. The court of Rome took a tender interest in these three works; that of Suarez is more frequently referred to in the correspondence kept up with the nuncio resident in France, in 1614: By what right does a parliament judge of points of doctrine? What does Suarez teach but the catholic faith? What dogma is more sacred than that of the sovereignty of popes over kings; direct sovereignty in religious matters, and not less efficacious though indirect in political ones? Even if some inaccuracies had glided into the book of father Suarez, did it not belong to the Holy See, alone, to perceive and ratify them? Such is the substance, during one entire year, of the letters written in the popes name to his nuncio Ubaldini7 However, the civil authority found defenders in two Scotch men, William Barclay and John his son; then in Anthony de Dominis, who did not spare the visible head of the church; but, especially in Edmund Richer, who combated with more calmness the ultramontane opinions, and yet was not the less the victim of his zeal for the Gallican liberties.8

Disputes with the dukes of Parma and of Savoy, the republic of Lucca, the Ligurians, and with the Swiss; attempts on the Valtaline; intrigues to support the inquisition at Naples, and to favour the Jesuits in Spain: these trifling details we shall dispense with, as generally tending but to prove the impotence of pontifical ambition from 1505 to 1621.

Urban VIII. who gave to the cardinals the t.i.tle of 'Eminence,' refused to Louis XIV. that of king of Navarre. This refusal, of which there are other examples, had for its source the excommunication and deposition of John d'Albret by Julius II? To support the sentence of Julius, the popes have been as silent as possible on this t.i.tle of king of Navarre, in speaking of the kings of France, heirs to John d'Albret.

7 Register of Letters from the Secretary of State of Paul V. to the bishop of Montepulciano, nuncio in France, 1613, 1614.-In the Archivet of the Empire.

8 Bossuet. Def. Cler. Gall. 1. 6, c. 30.

? See p. 380.

The parliament refused registering any bulls in which they noticed this omission: Urban VIII. was particularly reproached with it. This pontiff being desirous to interfere in the differences of the courts of France and Spain, on the affair of the Valteline, he had the vexation to learn that these two powers had signed the peace without his knowledge.

Nevertheless he succeeded in uniting to the Holy See the duchy of Urbino, with the counties of Montefeltro and Gubbio, the lords.h.i.+p of Pesaro, and vicariat of Sinigaglia: these domains were given him by the duke Francis Maria, the last branch of the house of Rovere. But cardinal Richlieu kept his eyes fixed on the designs of the pontiff; he refused an audience to the nuncio Scoti, and never suffered him to be ignorant, that the court of France would not consent to a dependence on the Holy See. The parliament had a publication of an Italian Jesuit, Santarelli, burned, which ascribed to the pope the right of deposing kings, condemning them to temporal punishments and loosing their subjects from their oath of allegiance. The work of Peter de Marca, on the concord of the priesthood and the empire, appeared about this time, and so displeased the court of Rome that it refused to confirm the nomination of the author to a bishop.r.i.c.k. De Marca had the weakness to modify his opinions at the pleasure of this court; and in the sequel, coveting the cardinalat, he dictated, a short time before his death, a treatise to Baluze on the infallibility of the pope. Intriguing as he was learned, de Marca sacrificed his sentiments to his interests: the works of this writer are useful from the quotations and facts which they embrace.

A pope could no longer declare war but against petty princes. Urban VIII. did so with the duke of Parma, who had refused to the holy father's relatives the price of services he pretended to have rendered him. The duke is cited, excommunicated, his duchy of Castro taken possession of, which was obliged to be restored him, by treaty, after four years of disputing and fighting. But, this war, badly extinguished, recommended under Innocent X. the successor of Urban: and, because the duke of Parma could not pay soon enough the enormous interests due to the 'Mont-de-piete,' Castro was confiscated, sacked, and razed, by order of the head of the church: on the ruins of this city, a column was raised with tills inscription, "Here Castro was." When a terrible war in which two great states engage, two powerful princes, or two blind and numerous factions, leads to such disasters, humanity must lament it: but, when a pecuniary interest, an obscure and trifling quarrel between two petty rivals, leads to the destruction of a city, the depression of its inhabitants, and the ruin of their families, and that this useless devastation was coolly ordered by one who had conquered without danger, and almost without an effort, we are filled with more astonishment than indignation; and we could not antic.i.p.ate such gratuitous severity in a prince, if this prince were not a pontiff, and this pontiff not the successor of Boniface VIII. Yet, it is astonis.h.i.+ng that the popes could have been so ignorant of their direct interest in husbanding the Italian cities, in attaching them to the Holy See by benefits, and finally, in restoring them that degree of prosperity and influence, which would enable them to contribute to the re-establishment in Europe of the pontifical dominion. Many popes of the sixteenth century acted on this policy; and it is in consequence of its neglect by those of the fifteenth and seventeenth, that the temporal power of the Roman church seems henceforth doomed to languish and become extinct.

Qui fu Castro.

A revolution had placed on the throne of Portugal John of Braganza, or John IV. whose ancestors had been dispossessed by the king of Spain, Philip II. Philip IV. who languished in a disgraceful supineness, did not attempt to re-conquer the kingdom of Portugal by arms. The court of Madrid had recourse to the pope Innocent X. who refused bulls to the bishops nominated by John of Braganza, and declared he would never recognize this new monarch. John consulted the universities of his States: they replied, if the pope persisted in his refusal, they had only to dispense with his bulls.-This was also the opinion of the a.s.sembly of the French clergy, interrogated on the same point by the Portuguese amba.s.sador. This a.s.sembly did more, it wrote to the pope, respectfully representing to him, that it was but right to grant the bulls to the prelates named by John; by which perhaps the French clergy evinced too great an interest in foreign affairs; but it shews us what its views were of canonical inst.i.tution, and the right to consider it as obtained, when refused by a vain caprice. Furthermore, Innocent at this period feared France and Portugal more than Spain: he therefore dispatched the bulls, and no longer contested with John of Braganza the t.i.tle of king.

Innocent even detached himself so from the court of Spain, that to support the Neapolitans who had revolted against her, he invited the duke of Guise, a descendant of the princes of Anjou, former kings of Naples, to a.s.sert his claims on this kingdom, and endeavour to conquer it; but the pope kept none of his promises which seduced the duke; and this perfidy was one of the causes which prevented his success. We shall observe, that there did not exist at this period any sort of alliance or friends.h.i.+p between the courts of France and of Rome. Innocent X. having commanded all the cardinals to reside in the capital of Christendom, with a prohibition to quit the territories of the Holy See, without the permission of the sovereign pontiff, the parliament of Paris annulled the decrees as unjustifiable; and cardinal Mazarin forbade the sending money from France to the Roman court. In reflecting on this last arrangement, the pope perceived he must relinquish the residence of the sacred college; but was consoled with the acquisition of the city of Albano from the duke Savelli.

But the most remarkable event of the pontificate of Innocent was, the opposition he presumed to make to the treaties of Munster and Osnabruck.-Long rivalries and b.l.o.o.d.y wars harra.s.sed, and almost exhausted, Europe; these treaties were at length to terminate those disasters. But a bull arrives, in which the vicar of the lamb of G.o.d protests against the peace of the world, and in which he annuls, as far as in him lies, the concord of the Christian republic. They have, he said, given up ecclesiastical property to the reformed; they have permitted to the reprobate the exercise of civil employments; they have, without the permission of the Holy See, encreased the number of electors; they have preserved privileges in the states to those who have ceased to have them in the church; the church abrogates these odious articles, these rash concessions, these heretical conventions. Innocent, no doubt, suspected, that war would afford more chances to the court of Rome, and that the ecclesiastical power had nothing to gain by a peace which would restore to the secular governments more stability, activity, and interior prosperity: but he was too little acquainted with the period at which he published such a bull; he did not perceive, that the pontifical ambition, before detested, was now only ridiculed; and he compromised by a silly step, which they scarcely deigned to notice, the weak remains of the authority of his predecessors.

Not having undertaken a detailed history of all the pontifical intrigues, we shall take leave to be silent on the five propositions of Jansenius, condemned by Innocent X. and his successor Alexander VII. who ordered the signature of a formulary, long famous. These quarrels, already deplorable at the end of the seventeenth century, became so contemptible in the course of the eighteenth, that success or defeat was equally attended with dishonour. In dividing the clergy into two parties, almost equally disregarded, these wretched controversies weakened the influence of the priesthood, and consequently that of the first pontiff. From 1659, Alexander might have perceived the decline of his credit in Europe, when, after having attempted to mingle in the negociations between France and Spain, he found they had treated without him. Nevertheless he ventured three years after to displease the most powerful monarch of the age. Crequi, the amba.s.sador of Louis XIV. at Rome, was insulted by the pontifical guard, which killed one of his pages and fired on the carriage of his lady. Obtaining no satisfaction of the pope or of his ministers, Crequi retired to the Florentine territories. Louis demanded a solemn reparation: and, not considering that adequate which he had been made wait four months for, he marched some troops against Rome, and took possession of the city and county of Avignon, which a decree of the parliament re-united to the crown the 26th of July 1663. Alexander did not let slip this opportunity of displaying against a great prince the spiritual and temporal arms, only until he had solicited in vain the support and concurrence of all the catholic states rivals of France. Then the Holy See prudently humbled itself, and the cardinal Chigi, nephew of the pope, came to make to Louis all the reparation which this monarch required. In Europe no high idea existed of the veracity of Alexander: "We have a pope," writes Renaldi, the amba.s.sador of Florence at Rome, "we have a pope who never speaks a word of truth."

Mem. of Cardinal de Retz. vol. 5. p. 177, ed. of 1718. In support of this testimony of Renaldi, in our 2d vol. will be found a secret writing in which Alexander VII. contradicts his own public declarations. This doc.u.ment, of eight pages, is wholly in the hand writing of this pontiff, and is dated by him 18th of February, 1664.

This pontiff died in 1664, leaving his family abundantly enriched, and the Roman people loaded with nine new subsidies besides the old, which had been very scrupulously maintained.

After Clement IX. had suppressed for awhile the disputes excited by the formulary, and that the cardinal Altieri had, for the s.p.a.ce of six years, peacefully governed the church under the name of Clement X. his uncle Odescalchi, or Innocent XI. bore with him to the chair of St Peter more energy and ambition. He felt for Louis XIV. a personal enmity which he could not dissimulate, and which burst forth on two important occasions, that of the 'regale.' and that of the right of franchise.

The 'regale' was a right which the kings of France had for many centuries enjoyed, and which consisted in receiving the revenues of the vacant sees, and in nominating to the benefices dependent on the bishop.

Some churches having attempted to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from this law, Louis, by an edict of 1673, declared that the 'regale' applied to all the bishoprics of the kingdom. Two bishops protested against this edict; those of Pamiers and of Aleth, known by their opposition to the formulary of Alexander VII. These two prelates, refractories to the decrees of the popes, were supported by Innocent XI. in their resistance to the will and rights of their sovereign. An a.s.sembly of the clergy of France, having adhered to the king's edict, and the pope having condemned this adhesion, the heat of their disputes led minds on to an examination into the rights and pretensions of the pope himself, and the four celebrated articles of 1682 were produced.

That the ecclesiastical power does not extend to the temporals of sovereigns; that a general council is superior to a pope, as decided by the fathers of Constance; that the judgment of the pope in matters of faith is not an infallible rule, until after having received the approbation of the church; that the laws and customs of the Gallican church ought to be maintained: such is the substance of the four articles. Innocent XI. condemned them; he refused bulls to the bishops nominated by the king, and forgot nothing that might provoke a separation; already a patriarchate was spoken of in France, independent of the court of Rome.

It is of Innocent XI. that Fontaine speaks in these lines, addressed in 1688 to the Prince de Conti:

Pour nouvelles de l'Italie Le pape empire tons les jours- Expliquez, seigneur, ce discours Du cote de la maladie: Car aucun Saint-pere autrement Ne doit empirer nullement Celai-ci, veritablement.

N'est envers nous ni saint ni pere, &c.

In English:

As to the news from Italy, The pope each day grows worse and worse.- Upon the score of malady Explain my lord this strange discourse.

In any other sense than this So to decline would be amiss, Yet much I fear the man you paint Will prove to us no other father-saint.

Racine, in 1689, alluded to the same pope in these lines of the prologue of 'Esther':

Et l'enfer, couvrant tout de ses vapeurs funebres, Sur les yeux les plus saints ajete les tenebres.

In English.:

"And h.e.l.l with darkness spreading all the skies "Casts its thick film o'er the most holy eyes."

Bossuet had been the princ.i.p.al compiler of the four articles; the court of Rome, which wished to oppose to him an adversary worthy of him, offered the cardinalat to the celebrated Arnauld, if he would write against these four maxims. Amauld replied to this proposal as to an insult: it became necessary to, he says, "have not concealed the fact, that it depended on himself alone to be clothed with the Roman purple, and, that to attain a dignity which would have so gloriously washed away all the reproaches of heresy which his enemies have dared to make against him, it would have cost him nothing but to write against the propositions of the clergy of France relative to the pope's authority."

Far from accepting these offers, he even wrote against a Flemish doctor who had treated these propositions as heretical. One of the king's ministers who read this piece, charmed with the force of its reasoning, proposed having it printed at the Louvre; but the jealousy of M.

Amauld's enemies carried it against the fidelity of the minister and even the interest of the king; it might apply for defenders to an humbler rank, to the theologians of Louvain, to Gonzales general of the Jesuits, to Roccaberti the Dominican, Sfrondati the Benedictine, and to Aguirre, another Benedictine, who was rewarded with a red hat. Their writings are forgotten, but the 'Defence of the four articles,' remains among the number of Bossuet's best works. We must observe, it was not printed till 1730, a delay which can only be ascribed to the intrigues of a part of the clergy, already repentant for their firmness in 1682. A more correct edition of the work of Bos-suet, and a French translation accompanied by notes, appeared in 1745, without privilege, and as issued from the press of Amsterdam. No direction of Louis XIV. if we except those of his will, has been worse executed than the edict by which he commanded that the doctrine of the four articles should be annually taught in the schools of theology. The Jesuits have never professed them, and the idea of abrogating them has been often entertained from the year 1700 to the end of cardinal Fleury's ministry. If this abrogation has not taken place it was, that they feared the remonstrances of the Jansenists, and foresaw the credit it would give them, by const.i.tuting them sole defenders of the liberties of the Gallican church. In the matter of the franchises Louis XIV. was perhaps wrong. The other catholic monarchs had relinquished this strange privilege, by which the palaces of the amba.s.sadors, and even their precincts, offered an asylum to malefactors from the pursuit of justice.

The king of France declared that he never took the conduct of others for his rule, but on the contrary, that he meant to serve as their example.

His amba.s.sador, Lavardin, in 1687, came to Rome to a.s.sert the 'Franchises' and affected to brave the pontiff by a pompous entry. The censures thundered against Lavardin irritated Louis XIV: Avignon was once more taken; and these hasty disputes had led to a decisive rupture, if it were not possible to reconcile it with the severities exercised since 1685 against the protestants. The proscription of the Calvinists restored harmony in this delicate conjuncture between the court of France and the Holy See.

Avignon was restored to the successor of Innocent XI. Alexander VIII.

who condemned equally the Four Articles of 1682. Innocent XII. after him, persevered in refusing bulls to the bishops, favourers of the four articles, and he obtained from them a letter which he accepted as a retraction. It said, in effect,

"that "all which might have been held decreed in 1682, on "the ecclesiastical power, ought to be held as not de- "creed, since they had no intention of making any "decree, nor of doing prejudice to the churches."--

Ambiguous words and most fortuitously framed, which a.s.suredly do not tend to confirm the four articles, but which, on the other hand, would be quite insignificant, if they did not evince a disposition to abandon them. This letter, but little creditable, was one of the effects of the revocation of the edict of Nantes, one of the evidences of the decaying character of Louis the Great, and one of the proofs of what we have elsewhere4 a.s.serted, the secret inclination which, since the year 1560, bia.s.sed the French clergy towards the ultramontane system.

D'Aguesseau says that "the terms of this letter were coached so that it could only be considered as a testimony of the grief of these bishops, in learning the prejudice which this pope entertained with respect to them, in regard to what had pa.s.sed in the a.s.sembly held at Paris in 1682. They did not avow that these pretensions were well founded." Whatever d'Aguesseau may say about it, the letter of these bishops does them no honour: it will be found in our second volume.