the towns of Picardy and Artois, the place near which he had been born, in 1490. Everywhere he went he taught the people the new faith.
Some of Berquin’s hearers reported what they saw and heard to the bishop of Amiens, who reported him to Beda, the sleuthhound of the Sorbonne. Beda immediately became active in persecuting Berquin, for in some of his books Beda had read, “The Virgin Mary is improperly invoked instead of the Holy Ghost.” “Faith alone justifies.” “Neither the gates of hell, nor Satan, nor sin can do anything against him who has faith in God.”
Berquin was arrested, imprisoned, and denounced as a heretic at his trial, May 13, 1523, before parliament. His library was seized, and seven of his own writings and one each of his translations of Luther and Melanchthon were burned August 8 in front of Notre Dame.
The Reformer was asked to retract his errors, but since he absolutely refused to do this, he was taken back to prison to await execution.
Margaret, an angel of mercy to hundreds of persecuted Protestants in France, interceded for him with her brother, the king, and he was immediately set at liberty. Of Margaret it was said that she “took wondrous pains to save those who were in danger, and that she alone prevented the Reformation from being stifled in the cradle.”
After obtaining his liberty, Berquin returned to Artois and continued to preach from the Scriptures the doctrine of salvation by Christ alone. He condemned the celibacy of the priesthood as contrary to Biblical teachings.
At one time he remarked, “You will often meet with these words in Holy Scripture: honorable marriage, undefiled bed, but of celibacy you will not find a syllable.” At another time he said, “We must teach the Lord’s flock to pray with understanding, that they may no longer be content to gabble with their lips like ducks with their bills, without comprehending what they say.”
From 1523 to 1526 France was filled with troubles, the greatest of which was the loss of the Battle of Pavia, with the resulting imprisonment of Francis I at Madrid. These episodes gave respite to the Protestants, as a period of tolerance set in, but not for long.
In the meantime the queen mother and regent, Louise of Savoy, felt she needed to conciliate parliament and the Sorbonne. She recognized the feeling of French society that her son’s capture and imprisonment were a direct punishment for his leniency toward the Protestants; and since her religious sentiments were usually swayed by the best political policy of the moment, she aided the Sorbonne and parliament in their efforts to track down heretics. With royal power now in her hands she issued an edict that all sympathizers with the new doctrine should be handed over for trial to a group of selected bishops, “an extraordinary court to judge the heretics.”
Berquin became one of the earliest victims under the decree. For the second time, in January, 1526, he was thrown into prison, this time at Louise’s behest, and again condemned to the stake.
Margaret pleaded unsuccessfully with her mother for Berquin’s release, for Louise thought that by burning and torturing the Reformers she was buying papal support for Francis and possibly preventing an internal insurrection against herself and her son in France.
Then Margaret appealed to her brother in his Spanish prison, and on the day of his return to Paris, March 17, he sent word to parliament to release the prisoner. After considerable delay, Berquin was again granted his freedom.
Berquin, with Margaret’s help, had won his second round with the papists; and this gave him courage far beyond what the times warranted.
He believed that Francis was truly on the Protestant side and would protect and help him; for, to convert all France to Protestantism had now become a holy obsession with Berquin.
With indomitable courage and energy he formed a daring plan whereby all France would be liberated from the pope’s domination. It was his
conviction that if he and the king, and his old mentor Erasmus, would strike unitedly their strategy could not fail; but he felt that he could never be successful without the king’s sanction. He thought that Francis would not oppose. Had not the king twice set him free? Had he not allowed the return of the Meaux preachers who had been exiled in Strasbourg since Louise’s edict? Had not Lefevre become a tutor to the king’s youngest son? All these things seemed to indicate the king’s favor.
Before he proceeded further, Berquin wished to enlist the aid of Erasmus.
To him he wrote, “Under the cloak of religion the priests hide the vilest passions, the most corrupt manners, the most scandalous unbelief. We must tear off the veil that conceals this hideous mystery, and boldly brand the Sorbonne, Rome, and all their hirelings, with impiety.”
Erasmus advised him to keep silent and to retire, but that, if he must attack Rome, he should obtain a power of attorney from the king. “Think, dear Berquin, think constantly what a hydra you are attacking, and by how many mouths it spits its venom.”
That his old friend and teacher should advise such caution grieved Berquin.
However, he received courage for his undertaking from another source.
Francis, as a patron of learning and a pupil of Erasmus, had imprisoned Beda for publishing a refutation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases and
Annotations.
From Beda’s writings Berquin now took twelve propositions, “manifestly impious and blasphemous,” and took them to Francis, who promised that the Sorbonne would examine them.
This raised Berquin’s spirits to the highest point as he thought of the king’s acting the part of another elector of Saxony. “I will follow these redoubtable hornets into their holes; I will fall upon these insensate blabbers, and scourge them,” he said.
Francis kept his promise and presented the propositions to the bishop of Bazas, requesting him to give them to the rector of the university for the purpose of examination by four assembled faculties.
Erasmus tried once more to stop Berquin in what he considered his “mad”
venture, for he was certain it could lead only to one place — the stake.
“Even should your cause be holier than that of Christ Himself,” he wrote him, “your enemies have resolved to put you to death.”
Berquin could see no failure ahead; if only he, Francis, and Erasmus could act in unison, then all France would become Protestant. But “just as Francis I stretches out his hand, the scholar of Rotterdam draws back.”
Francis, too, was caught in a dilemma. In need of money to pay the heavy fine at Madrid, he appealed to the bishops, who suggested the
extermination of the Lutherans in exchange for Catholic gifts or loans of money.
In 1529 the great French Council of Sens met to redeclare the position of the church on infallibility, its right to make canonical regulations, and its various fasts, sacraments, mass, and adoration of the saints. It also asked that the secular arm enforce their sentences upon heretics.
Before the council disbanded, the news circulated that the most sacred image in Paris, the statue of the Blessed Virgin and Child, located in the Quartier St. Antoine, had been desecrated by beheading and mutilation.
The council, the king, and all Paris were enraged.
As the Sorbonne got the upper hand, Berquin’s friends urged him to flee, but he considered flight an act of cowardice. The Sorbonne considered Berquin the instigator of the outrage on the image; consequently they asked that Berquin be delivered to them. And the king consented that an inquiry be made concerning him.
Berquin was imprisoned once more, and the doctors of the Sorbonne determined to make the pupil pay the penalty they were powerless to impose upon his master, Erasmus. Duprat, Louise of Savoy, and Montmorency all agreed with the university; and twelve judges were appointed to try Berquin.
These judges had a great deal of respect for Berquin. They knew his holy life, his irreproachable character, and the esteem in which he was generally held; and they were of no mind to persecute him.
The Reformer saw his opportunity and resolved to appeal to the king once more by means of Margaret’s intercession. She wrote her brother a letter, and Berquin had an interview with Francis. For a time it seemed that Berquin would go free again, but a letter he had written to a friend asking him to burn some books he had left behind, betrayed him to Beda.
At the close of his trial he was told that he had been convicted of belonging to the sect of Luther and of writing wicked books. He was requested to bear a lighted taper in the great court of the palace and to ask the pardon of the king and of God.
“You will then be taken, bareheaded and on foot, to the Greve, where you shall see your books burnt,”
his persecutors told him.
“After doing penance at Notre Dame, you shall have your tongue pierced — that instrument of unrighteousness by which you have so grievously sinned. Lastly you shall be taken to the prison of Monsieur de Paris [the bishop], and be shut up there all your life between four walls of stone; and we forbid that you be supplied either with books to read, or pen or ink to write.”
After hearing his sentence Berquin was sent back to prison, and Margaret wrote the following prayer:
Thou, God, alone canst say:
Touch not my son, take not his life away.
Thou only canst Thy sovereign hand outstretch To ward the blow.
At this time Bude, one of France’s great scholars, who had allied himself with the Protestants at Meaux, pleaded with Berquin to accept his sentence, but Berquin said he would make another appeal to the king.
Francis, however, now at Blois, gave no sign of recognition. For a moment Berquin was almost persuaded to recant, but when Bude returned a short time after, the condemned man said, “I would rather die than by my silence countenance the condemnation of truth.”
By an extraordinary assumption of authority, the judges changed their sentence to that of strangling and burning; and Beda commanded haste in its execution, lest the king return and change his mind.
For his death, Berquin put on his finest clothes, for he said that
“the King of heaven had invited him to the wedding.” “He wore a cloak of velvet, a doublet of satin and damask, and golden hose, and the calmness of a good conscience was visible in every feature,”
a biographer has written.
One author reports that more than twenty thousand people came, April 17, 1529, to see him executed by strangling, and then to see his body
burned at the stake. Theodore Beza later remarked: “He might have been the Luther of France had Francis been a Frederick of Saxony.”