St. Alphonsus Liguori: The History of Heresies and Their Refutation

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CHAPTER XI. – THE HERESIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

II -THEODORE BEZA, THE HUGUENOTS, AND OTHER CALVINISTS,

WHO DISTURBED FRANCE, SCOTLAND, AND ENGLAND

72. Theodore Beza; his character and vices.
73. His learning, employments, and death.
74. Conference of St. Francis de Sales with Beza.
75. Continuation of the same subject.
76, 77. Disorders of the Huguenots in France.
78. Horrors committed by them; they are proscribed in France.
79.-Their disorders in Flanders.
80. And in Scotland.
81. Mary Stuart is married to Francis II.
82. She returns to Scotland, and marries Darnley; next Bothwell; is driven by violence to make a fatal renunciation of her Crown in favour of her son.
83.  She takes refuge in England, and is imprisoned by Elizabeth, and afterwards condemned to death by her. 84. Edifying death of Mary Stuart.
85. James I., the son of Mary, succeeds Elizabeth; he is succeeded by his son, Charles I., who was beheaded. 86. He is succeeded by his son, Charles II., who is succeeded by his brother, James II., a Catholic, who died in France.


72. At Calvin’s death, he left the direction of the unfortunate city of Geneva to Theodore Beza, a worthy successor of his, both in life and doctrines. He was born on the 24th of June. 1519, in Vezelais, in Burgundy, of a noble family, and was educated his uncle, who sent him to Paris, to study his Humanity, and afterwards to Orleans, to learn Greek, under Melchior Wolmar, Calvin’s master, first in Greek, and next in heresy. His appearance was agreeable, his manners polished, and he was a great favourite with all his acquaintance. He led, when young, an immoral life, and wrote several amatory poems; he had an intrigue with a tailor’s wife in Paris, of the name of Claudia, and he has been charged with even more abominable crimes. His uncle resigned a Priorate, which he held, in his favour, and, likewise, made him  his heir; but he spent not only that and his paternal property, but even stole the chalices and ornaments of a church belonging to the natives of Burgundy, in Orleans, of which he was Procurator. For this he was imprisoned, but soon liberated; and soon after he published in Paris a shocking epigram, regarding a person named Audabcrt, which induced the Court of Paris to order his imprisonment. This terrified him, for, if convicted of the crime he was charged with, the penalty was burning alive. He was reduced to the greatest poverty, for he not only ran through his property, but also sold his Priorate for twelve hundred crowns; and even in this transaction, he was guilty of dishonesty, for he prevailed on the agents of his benefice to pay him the revenue of it before it came due. Covered with infamy, he changed his name to Theobald May, and fled to Geneva, taking Claudia with him, whom he then married, though her husband was still living. He presented himself to Calvin, who, finding he studied under Wolmar, received him, and procured him a Professorship of Greek, and from that he was promoted to a Professorship of Theology in Lausanne. The Ministers of that city, though apostates, yet having a knowledge of the crimes already committed by Beza, and seeing the debauched life he led, refused to admit him to the Ministry; but he was sustained by Calvin, whom he venerated almost to adoration, so that he was called Calvinolator, the adorer of Calvin (1).


73. In his teaching he surpassed even Calvin in impiety, for the one admitted, though obscurely, the body of Christ in the Eucharist, but the other said, in the Conference of Poissy, that the body of Christ was as far from the Eucharist as heaven is from the earth; and although he was obliged to retract, nevertheless, in a letter of his, he again repeats the same sentiment (2); and one of his companions, as Spondanus tells us, said, what wonder is it, that Beza does not believe that, when he scarcely believes in the existence of God (3). On the occasion of the outbreak of the Calvinists against the Priests of the Church of St. Medard (N. 69), he boasted not only of the insult to the Church and the Priests, but especially of the horrible profanation of the Holy Eucharist. He wrote a letter of congratulation to the Queen of England, praising her for assisting to plant the Faith in France by blood and slaughter; and when he went to the Congress of Worms, where Calvin sent him, to try and gain friends for his sect, and Melancthon asked him, “Why the French caused so many disasters in France ?” He said, “They only did what the Apostles had done before them.” ” Why, then,” said Melancthon, do you not suffer stripes, as the Apostles did.” Beza made him no answer, but turned his back on him.

Although nearly seventy years old when his wife Claudia died, he married a very young widow, of whom we shall have occasion to speak hereafter. Florimund (4) says, that a nobleman of Guienne returning from Home, in the year 1600, called on Beza,. and found him a venerable old man, with a long white beard, and in his hand a beautifully bound little volume. When the gentle man asked him what it contained, he showed him that it was a book of sonnets, and said : ” Sic tempus fallo” ” I thus cheat time.” ” Oh,” said the gentleman to a friend of his, ” is it thus this holy man, with one foot already in Charon’s bark, passes his time.” Beza continued for forty-one years after Calvin’s death to govern the Church of Geneva, or, rather, to poison it by his bad example and doctrine; he was, however, called to account for all before God, in the year 1605, the eighty-fifth of his age (5). Let not the reader wonder that I have said so much about the vices of Luther, Calvin, and Beza. 1 have done so on purpose, that every one may understand that God did not send such men to reform his Church, but, rather, the devil, to destroy it. In this, however, no heresiarch ever can or ever has succeeded, for our Lord has promised to protect it to the end of the world, ” and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”


74. I will here relate a Conference St. Francis de Sales had with Beza, about the year 1597, as we find it in the Saint’s life (6). Clement VIII. desired St. Francis to see Beza, and try could he convert him.

The Saint made his way into Geneva, at the risk of his life, and called on Beza, whom he found alone. He commenced, by begging Beza not to believe all he heard of him from his enemies. Beza answered, that he always considered St. Francis a man of learning and merit, but that he regretted seeing him devote his energies to prop up anything so weak as the Catholic religion. St. Francis then asked him, if it was his opinion, that a man could be saved in the Catholic Church ? Beza demanded a little time, before he would give his answer; he went into his study, remained walking about for a quarter of an hour, and then coming out said : ” Yes; I believe that a man may be saved in the Catholic Church.” ” Why, then,” said St. Francis, ” have you established your Reformation with so much bloodshed and destruction, since, without any danger a man may be saved, and never leave the Catholic Church.” ” You have put obstacles in the way of salvation,” said Beza, “in the Catholic Church, by inculcating the necessity of good works; but we, by teaching salvation by Faith alone, have smoothened the way to heaven.” ” But you,” said St. Francis, ” by denying the necessity of good works, destroy all human and divine laws, which threaten punishment to the wicked, and promise rewards to the good; and Christ says, in the Gospel, that not only those who do evil, but, likewise, those who omit to do the good commanded to be done, shall suffer eternal punishment. It is necessary, also,” said he, ” in order to know the true Faith, that there should be some judge from whom there is no appeal, and to whose judgment all should submit; for otherwise disputes never would have an end, and the truth never could be found.” Beza then began talking about the Council of Trent, and said that the only rule of Faith was the Scriptures, and that the Council did not follow them. St. Francis answered, that the Scriptures had different meanings, and that it was necessary that their true sense should be decided by the Church. ” But,” said Beza, ” the Scriptures are clear, and the Holy Ghost gives to every one the internal understanding of their true sense.” ” How, then, does it happen,” said St. Francis, ” if the Scripture be clear, and the Holy Ghost inspires the true sense of it to every one, that Luther and Calvin, both, in the opinion of the Reformers, inspired by God, held the most opposite opinions in the most important questions of Religion. Luther says, that the real body of Christ is in the Eucharist; Calvin, on the other hand, that it is only the virtue of Christ. How, then, can we know, when so great a difference exists, to which of the two, Luther or Calvin, the Holy Ghost has revealed the truth ? Besides, Luther denies the Canonicity of the Epistle of St. James, and of some other books of the Holy Scriptures; Calvin admits it. Whom are we to believe ?” They had now been disputing for three hours, and when Beza saw himself thus hemmed up in a corner, he lost his temper, and only answered the Saint’s arguments by abuse. St. Francis, then, with his accustomed meekness, said he did not come to give him any annoyance, and took his leave.


75. Sometime after, again at the request of the Pope, St. Francis paid him a second visit, and, among many things then discussed, they argued especially concerning Free Will, for Calvin blasphemously asserted, that whatever man does, he does through necessity that if he is predestined he does what is good if he is not, he does what is evil. The Saint proved the doctrine of Free Will so clearly, both from the Old and the New Testament, that Beza was convinced of its truth, and, cordially taking St. Francis by the hand, said that he daily prayed to God, that if he was not in the right way, he might lead him to it. This shows the doubts he entertained of his new faith; for those who are certain that they profess the true faith, never pray to God, to enlighten them to adopt another, but to confirm and preserve them in the Faith they profess. Finally, St. Francis thinking him now better disposed after this acknowledgment, spoke to him plainly, and told him, that now his years should lead him to reflect whether he was not letting the time of mercy pass by, and preparing himself for the day of justice that, as he was now near the close of life, he should defer his conversion no longer, but return immediately to the Church he had forsaken that if he feared the persecution he would suffer from the Calvinists, he should remember he ought to suffer everything for his eternal salvation; but as Luther himself remarked, it is hard to expect that the head of any sect will forsake the doctrines he has taught others, and become a convert. Beza said that he did not despair of salvation in his own Church. The Saint then seeing that his heart was made of stone, left him under a promise of returning soon again to visit him; but this was not in his power, for the Genevese put guards to watch their Minister, and determined to put St. Francis to death if he ever came again. Some say that Beza was anxious to see him again, and that he retracted his errors, and that on that account his friends gave out that the violence of his sickness deranged his mind; but we know nothing of this for certain, and it is most probable that he died as he lived. The writer of St. Francis’s life says, also, that Des Hayes, Governor of Montargis, being in Geneva., and conversing familiarly one day with Beza, asked him, why he remained in his new sect? He pointed out to him a young woman in his house, and said, this is what retains me; and it is supposed that this was his second wife, whom he married when he was seventy years old.


76. We have now to speak of the French Calvinists, or Huguenots, as they are generally called, as is supposed, from the castle of Hugon, near Toulouse, close by which they had their first conventicle, and of the desolation they caused in France. Volumes would not suffice to relate all the destruction caused by Calvin and his followers, not only in France, but in many other countries. I will only then give a sketch of them, to show how much harm one perverse heresiarch may occasion. During the reigns of Francis I. and his son, Henry II., though both zealous Catholics, and ever prosecuting the Calvinists with the utmost rigour, even condemning many of them to the stake, still this heresy was so spread through every province of the kingdom, that there was not a city or town but had its temple and ministers of the new sect. In the year 1559, however, when Henry was succeeded by his son, Francis II., only sixteen years of age, it broke forth like a torrent, and overwhelmed the whole kingdom with errors, sacrileges, sedition, and bloodshed (7). Jeane, Queen of Navarre, was the chief promoter of all this; she used all her endeavours to extinguish the Faith; she encouraged the heretics to take up arms, and when they were worsted, she was always ready to assist them. She encouraged Louis Bourbon, Prince of Conde, too, at his first presentation to her, to take up arms in the cause of the Reformation, and she was the head of the conspiracy of Amboise, which, however, did not succeed according to her wishes (8). The Huguenots, how ever, are blamed for the death of the young King, Francis II., who, it is said, was poisoned by a Huguenot surgeon, at the age of seventeen, by putting poison into his ear while treating him for an abscess (9).


77. A royal decree was published in the reign of Charles IX., granting leave to the Calvinists to hold  meetings, and preach outside the cities, and on this occasion, nothing could equal the disturbances they caused. The first outbreak took place in Vassay, in Champagne, where seventy Calvinists were killed; the Prince of Conde immediately put himself at the head of the Calvinistic party, and they declared war against their King and country. They took several cities, and destroyed the churches, broke open the tombs of Saints, and burned their relics. Many battles were subsequently fought, in which the rebels were beaten, though not conquered.

The first was fought in Dreux, in the Vennassain, in which Conde was taken prisoner by Francis of Guise, who commanded the Catholics, and Anthony, King of Navarre, who commanded the royal army, was so severely wounded, that he died shortly after, leaving an only son Henry, who was afterward the famous Henry IV., King of France. In the following year, 1563, while the Duke of Guise, commander of the royal troops, was besieging Orleans, he was treacherously wounded by one John Poltroze, employed by Beza; the wound proved mortal, and the Queen-Mother made a treaty of peace with the heretics, most hurtful to the Catholic interests, but which was subsequently modified by another edict (10).


78. The Calvinists went to war again in 1567, and were again beaten, and in the year 1569, the Catholics gained the battle of Jarnac, in which the Prince of Conde, leader of the Calvinists, was killed (11). In the year 1572, a great number of Calvinists were killed on St. Bartholomew’s day, and it is thought that not less than a hundred thousand Calvinists perished in this war; such were the hellish fruits of the doctrines Calvin taught. It is terrifying to read the details of the excesses committed by the Calvinists against the Churches, the Priests, the Sacred Images, and especially the Holy Eucharist. It is related in the Annals of France, in the year 1563 (12), that a Huguenot went into the church of St. Genevieve, and possessed by a diabolical spirit, snatched the Sacred Host out of the hands of the officiating Priest; he paid dearly, however, for the sacrilege, as he was immediately taken, his hand was cut off, he was then hanged, and his body burned. As an atonement for this irreverence, the same month, the King, his mother, the Princes of the blood, and the Parliament, went in procession from the chapel royal to the church of St. Genievieve, bearing lighted torches in their hands.

About this time, also, the Huguenots, burned the body of St. Francis a Paula, which was preserved incorrupt for fifty years, in the church of St. Gregory of Tours, in the suburbs of Tours. Louis XIV. Used every means, by sending preachers among these sectaries, to convert them, and finally adopted such rigorous measures against them, that a great many returned to the Faith, and those who refused compliance, left the kingdom. Innocent XI., in the year 1685, wrote him a letter, praising his zeal (13).


79. Would to God, however, that the plague never spread further than France, and never tainted any other kingdom. The Low Countries were likewise infected by it, and the chief reason of its spreading there, was on account of the Lutheran and Calvinistic troops, maintained by the house of Austria to oppose France; both sects rivalled each other in making proselytes there, but Calvin sent many of his  disciples to Flanders, and the Calvinists, therefore, remained the most numerous. The Flemings, also, felt themselves aggrieved by the Spanish Governors, and succeeded with Philip II., in obtaining the recal of Cardinal Granville, who had been sent as Counsellor of Mary, Queen of Hungary, and sister of Charles V., Regent of the Low Countries. This was a most fatal blow to the Catholic cause, for this great prelate, by his vigorous measures, and his zealous administration of his Inquisitorial powers, kept the heretics in check, but after his departure, in 1556, they broke out into open insurrection, wrecked the churches of Antwerp, broke the altars and images, and left the monasteries heaps of ruins, and this sedition spread through Brabant and other provinces, already infected with heresy, so that the Regent felt herself obliged to grant them a provisional licence for the exercise of their false Religion. King Philip refused to ratify this concession, and the heretics again took up arms; the King then sent the Duke of Alva with a powerful army to chastise them, but the Prince of Orange, though under many obligaions to the King of Spain, proclaimed himself chief of the rebels and Calvinists, and led an army of thirty thousand Germans into the Low Countries (14).

The scale of victory inclined sometimes to one side, sometimes to another, but the whole province was in rebellion against the King of Spain and the authority of the Catholic Church. The best authority to consult regarding this war of the Netherlands is Cardinal Bentivoglio. Although the Calvinists were most numerous in Holland, it is now divided between a thousand sects Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians, and the like. There are, likewise, a great number of Catholics; and, although they do not enjoy the free exercise of their Religion, still they are tolerated, and allowed to have private chapels in the cities, and in the country towns and villages they enjoy greater freedom* (15).


80. Calvinism spread itself also into Scotland, and totally infected that kingdom. Varillas (16) gives the whole history of its introduction there; we will give a sketch of it. The perversion of this kingdom commenced with John Knox, an apostate Priest, of dissolute morals, who was at first a Lutheran, but after wards residing some time in Geneva, and being intimate with Calvin, became one of his followers, and so ardent was he in his new Religion, that he promised Calvin that he would risk everything to plant it in Scotland; soon after, he quitted Geneva, and came to Scotland, to put his design into execution. The opportunity was not long wanting. Henry VIII., King of England, strove to induce his nephew, James V., King of Scotland, to follow his example, and establish a schism, and separate himself from the Roman Church, and invited him to meet him in some place where they could hold a conference, and discuss the matter. King James excused himself under various pretexts, and the upshot of the matter was, that Henry went to war with him. James gave the command of his army to a favourite of his, Oliver Sinclair, whom the nobility obeyed with the greatest reluctance, as he was not of noble birth, and the consequence was, that the Scots were beaten, and James died of grief (17), leaving an infant only eight days old, to inherit his throne, Mary Stuart. Now this was exactly what Knox wanted; a long regency was just the thing to give him an opportunity to establish his opinions, and he unfortunately succeeded so well, that he substituted Calvinism for Catholicity.

* N.B This was written in 1770.

The infant Mary, being now Queen of Scotland, Henry VIII, asked her in marriage for his son Edward, afterwards the sixth of that name, and then only five years old* This demand raised two parties in the kingdom. James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, then all-powerful in Scotland, and Governor of the kingdom, favoured Henry’s wishes, gained over by Knox, who had already instilled heretical opinions into his mind; and one great reason he alledged was, that it would establish a perpetual peace between the two kingdoms. On the contrary, the Archbishop of St. Andrews, David Beatoun (18), afterwards Cardinal, and the Catholics, gave it all the opposition in their power, as tending to make Scotland a province of England; but the chief cause of their opposition to it, was the injury to Religion, for this marriage would draw Scotland into schism.


81. Meanwhile, the Regent, who was a friend of the heretics, permitted the Calvinists to disseminate their doctrines, and gave liberty to every one in private or in public to pray as he liked, or, in other words, to choose whatever religion he pleased. The Archbishop opposed this concession, but the Calvinists rose in arms against him, and imprisoned him, and made him promise to favour the English alliance. In this, however, they did not succeed, for previous to her departure for England, the Cardinal, with consent of the Queen-Mother, Mary of Lorrain, sister to the Prince of Guise, proposed to Francis I., King of France, to marry Mary to the Dauphin, son of Henry II. The King of France was very well pleased with the proposal, and sent a large body of troops into Scotland, which kept the Calvinists in check,, and enabled the Queen Regent to send her daughter to France, and so Mary was sent, before she completed her seventh year, to be brought up in the family of Henry II., and in time to be married to his son, Francis II. On the death of Francis I. and Henry II., Mary was married to Francis II., but was soon left a widow, and the marriage was not blessed with children. Queen Mary then returned to Scotland, where she found religious affairs in the greatest confusion. The Calvinists assassinated the Archbishop in his very chamber, and afterwards hanged his body out of the window (19).


82. The rebels, likewise, in this sedition, destroyed the churches, and obliged the Queen-Mother to grant them the free exercise of Calvinism. Such was the miserable state of the kingdom when the Queen returned to it from France; and she immediately set about remedying these religious disorders. About the year 1568 she married Henry Darnley (20), who was afterwards assassinated in the King’s house by Earl Bothwell, leaving one son, afterwards James VI (21). Bothwell, blinded with love of the Queen, engaged a body of conspirators, seized her as she was returning from visiting her son at Stirling, brought her to a castle, and obliged her to marry him. On hearing this the Calvinists immediately broke out into rebellion against her, and accused her of being privy to the murder of her former husband, since she married his murderer, but the principal cause of their hatred to her was her religion. Bothwell himself, however, who had to fly to Denmark from this outbreak, declared before his death that the Queen was perfectly innocent of Henry Darnley’s murder. The Calvinists, however, glad of a pretext to persecute the Queen, became so bold at last, that they took her prisoner and confined her in a castle, and the perfidious Knox advised that she should be put to death. The rebels did not go so far as that, but they told her that she should consent to be banished either into France or England, and should renounce the crown in favour of her son, and on her refusal they threatened to throw her into the lake, and one of them had the cowardice to hold a dagger to her breast. Under fear of death she then took the pen and signed the deed making over the kingdom to her son, then thirteen months old (22).


83. The poor Queen was still detained in prison, notwith standing her renunciation, so some of her friends planned and accomplished her liberation, but not knowing where to seek a place of security, she unfortunately sought it in England from Queen Elizabeth, who promised to aid and assist her as a sister Sovereign. Thus she threw herself into the power of the very woman of all others most anxious to deprive her of life and kingdom, for Mary was her only rival, and the greatest difficulty the Pope had in recognizing Elizabeth was, that while Mary lived she was the lawful inheritor of the English throne.

When Mary arrived in England, Elizabeth pretended to receive (23) her; but she imprisoned her first, at Carlisle, and afterwards in Bolton under pretence that her enemies wished to make away with her. The national pride of the Scotch was raised when they learned their Queen was a prisoner, and they invaded England with six thousand men. Elizabeth, then unprepared for war, had recourse to craft to avert the blow, and she therefore promised Mary that if she used her authority to make the Scotch retire from England, she would assist her to recover her king dom, but otherwise that there would be no chance of her liberation till the war was at an end. Mary yielded, and ordered the Scotch to disband themselves, under pain of high treason; the chiefs of the party were thus constrained to obey, but she was still kept in prison, and Elizabeth, to have another pretext for detaining her, induced Murray, a natural brother of Mary, and the Countess of Lennox, mother of the murdered Darnley, to accuse her of procuring her husband’s murder. Elizabeth appointed a commission to try her, and though many persons of the greatest weight took up her defence, still after being imprisoned nineteen years, and having changed from prison to prison, sixteen times in England alone, she was condemned to be beheaded. She received the news of her sentence with the greatest courage, and an entire resignation to the divine will. She asked for a pen, and wrote three requests to Elizabeth: First That after her death her servants might be at liberty to go where they pleased. Second To allow her to be buried in consecrated ground; and, Third Not to prosecute any one who wished to follow the Catholic faith.


84. The execution of the sentence was deferred for two months, but on the day appointed, the 18th of  February, 1587, at the dawn of day the officers of justice came to conduct her to the place of execution. The Queen asked for a confessor to prepare her for death, but was refused, and a minister was sent to her whom she refused to receive. It is said that she received the holy Communion herself, having, by permission of the Pope, St. Pius V., retained a consecrated particle for that purpose (24).

She then dressed herself with all the elegance of a bride, prayed for a short time in her oratory, and went to the scaffold which was prepared in the hall of Fotheringay Castle, the last prison she inhabited. Everything was covered with black, the hall, the scaffold, and the pulpit from which the sentence was read. Mary entered, covered with a long veil, which reached to her feet, a golden cross on her breast, a Rosary pendant at her girdle, and a crucifix in one hand, the Office of the Blessed Virgin in the other. She went forward with a majestic gait, and calling Melvin, her Major-domo, she saluted him with a serene countenance, and said : ” My dear Melvin, when I am dead go to my son, and tell him that I die in the Catholic Religion, and tell him if he loves me or himself to follow no other; let him put his trust in God, and He will help him, and tell him to pardon Elizabeth for my death, which I voluntarily embrace for the Faith.” She then requested the Governor to allow the persons composing her suite to be present at her death, that they might certify that she died in the Catholic Faith. She knelt down on a cushion covered with black, and heard the sentence signed by Elizabeth’s own hand read, she then laid her head on the block, and the executioner cut it off at the second stroke. Her body was buried near Queen Catherines, the wife of Henry VIII., and it is said this inscription was put on her tomb, but immediately after removed by order of Elizabeth : ” Maria Scotorum Regina virtutibus Regiis et animo Regio ornata, tyrannica crudelitate ornamentum nostri seculi extinguiter.” Mary’s death filled all Europe with horror and compassion for her fate, and even Elizabeth, when she heard it, could not conceal the effect it had on her, and said it was too precipitate, but for all that she continued to persecute the Catholics more and more, and added many martyrs to the Church (25).


85. James VI., King of Scotland, and the son of Queen Mary, took little heed of his mother’s advice or example, for, after Elizabeth’s death, being then King of Scotland, he succeeded her, and took the title of James I., King of Great Britain, and the year after his coronation, which took place in 1603, he ordered, under pain of death, that all Catholic Priests should quit the kingdom. In the year 1606 he brought out that famous declaration that the King of England was independent of the Roman Church, called the Oath of Supremacy. He died in 1625, the fifty-ninth year of his age, and the twenty-second of his English reign. He was the first King who governed the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, but he lived and died a heretic, while his mother lived forty-two years in almost continual sorrow and persecution, but died the death of the just. This unhappy Monarch was succeeded by his son, Charles I, born in the year 1600, and like his father, the Sovereign of three kingdoms; he followed his father’s errors in religion, and sent succours to the Calvinists in France, to enable them to retain Rochelle, then in their possession. He was unfortunate; for both the Scotch and English Parliamentarians took up arms against him, and after several battles he lost the kingdom. He took refuge with the Scotch, but they delivered him up to the English, and they, at Cromwell’s instigation, who was then aiming at sovereign power, condemned him to be beheaded, and he died on the scaffold on the 30th of July, 1648, the twenty- fifth of his reign and forty-eighth of his age.


86. He was succeeded by his son, Charles II., born in 1630; at his father’s death he went to Scotland, and was proclaimed King of that country and of England and Ireland likewise. Cromwell, who then governed the kingdom, under title of Protector of England, took the field against him, and put his forces to flight, so that Charles had to make his escape in disguise, first to France and afterwards to Cologne and Holland. He was recalled after Cromwell’s death, which took place in 1658, and was crowned King of England in 1661, and died in 1685, at the age of sixty-five. He was succeeded by his second brother, James II., born in 1633. James was proclaimed King on the day of his brother’s death, the 16th of February, 1685, and was soon after proclaimed King of Scotland, though he openly declared himself a Roman Catholic, and forsook the communion of the English Church. Ardently attached to the Faith, he promulgated, in 1687, an Edict of Toleration, granting to the Catholics the free exercise of Religion, but this lost him his crown, for the English called in William, Prince of Orange, who, though James’s son-in-law, took possession of the kingdom, and, in 1689, James had to fly to France. He soon after went over to Ireland, to keep possession of that kingdom at all events, but being again beaten he fled back again to France, and died in St. Germains, in 1701, the sixty-eighth year of his age. As this sovereign did not hesitate to sacrifice his temporal kingdom for the Faith, we have every reason to believe that he received an eternal crown from the Almighty. James II. left one son, James III., who died in the Catholic Faith in Rome.



(1) Gotti, c. 114, sec. 4, n, I, 6; Varillas, t. 2, l. 18, 137.
(2) Berti, Brev. Hist. t. 2, sec. 16, c. 1.
(3) Spondan, ad An. 1501, . 19.
(4) Floremund, Remund. I. 8, c. 17 n. 6.
(5) Gotti, loc. cit. n.7, 10. 
(6) Vita di St. Francesco di Sales, da Pietro Gallo, l. 2, c. 21, 22.
(7) Van Ranst, Hist. sec. 16, p. 322.
(8) Van Ranst, loc. cit. vide Her. t, 2, c. 272. 
(9) Spondan, ad an, 1560, n, 7.
(10) Nat. Alex. t. 19, c. 11, art. 9, n. 3, & 4.
(11) Nat. Alex. n. 5; Hermant, t. 2, c. 306.
(12) Apud Gotti, c. Ill, s. 4, n. 15.
(13) Gotti, loc. cit. n. 16, c. 17.
(14) Varillas, t. 2, I. 27, dalla p;. 441, Jovet Storia della Relia. t. 1, p 95.
(15) Jovet loc. cit, p. 105. 
(16) Varillas Hist. Her. t. 2, I 28, dalla p. 471; Hermant Histor. de Concil. t. 2, c. 265.
(17) Varillas, p. 475.
(18) Varillas, loc, cit.
(19) Varill. t. 2, l. 28, p. 426.
(20) Varill. p. 479. 
(21) Varill. p. 500. 
(22) Varill. p. 502, 503.
(23) Varill. p. 50 e. seg.
(24) Vide P. Suar. l. 3, in St. Thom. c. 72, ar. 8, in fin.
(25) Varillas, sopra, t. 2, l. 28; Bern, t. 4, s. 16, c. 11; Joves Istoria della Rel. t. 2, p. 84; Dizion. Port.