CHAP. XLII.]

PORT ROYAL.

35

endure persecution. Neither the political nor the religious tenets of the Jansenists were agreeable to Cardinal Richelieu. The Bishop of Ypres had violently opposed and denounced Richelieu's designs upon Lorraine and the Spanish Netherlands in a pamphlet entitled Mars Gallicus. St. Cyran himself, suspected on account of his connection with an enemy of France, had opposed the cassation of the marriage of the King's brother, Gaston d'Orleans, with Margaret of Lorraine.1 His own freely expressed opinions and those of his disciples of Port Royal respecting kings were but ill suited to royal ears in those days. He had also offended Richelieu by haughtily repulsing all his advances and repeatedly refusing the offer of a bishopric. In May, 1638, a lettre de cachet transferred St. Cyran to the dungeon of Vincennes. Persecution, however, as usual, served only to attract attention and add a new interest to his life and opinions. Port Royal acquired more influence than ever. It was now that the distinguished recluses began to gather round it to whom it chiefly owes its fame. The first of these were kinsmen of the abbess-her nephew Antony Lemaistre, her brother Antony Arnaud, the author of the celebrated treatise De la fréquente communion. These hermits, as they were called, and their pupils, inhabited a separate building called La maison des hommes. It was Arnaud and his colleague Nicole who published those works on grammar, logic, and other branches of education which still preserve their reputation. The Jesuits found themselves worsted in their own peculiar domain as instructors. A still greater champion appeared rather later in the Society-Blaise Pascal,2 the author of the Pensées, the redoubtable adversary of the Jesuits. Pascal, who had become a convert to Jansenism in 1646, entered Port Royal in 1654. His Lettres Provinciales (Letters to a Provincial) were a terrible blow to the Jesuits. It was after this period that they began to direct their attention more to worldly affairs and commerce, to their ultimate ruin.

The dangerous tendency of Jansenism had not escaped the vigilance of Rome and the more orthodox clergy. Jansenius's work Augustinus, was condemned by a bull of Pope Urban VIII. in 1643. In 1644, at the instigation of the Jesuits, eighty-five French bishops presented to Urban's successor, Innocent X., five propositions, extracted, as they said, from the Augustinus, for

For these occurrences, see Vol. iii. p. 224 sqq.

2 Born at Clermont in Auvergne in

1623. St. Cyran was released from Vincennes after the death of Richelieu.

36

DESTRUCTION OF PORT ROYAL.

[CHAP. XLII. condemnation as heretical. Only a small minority of prelates stood up in their defence, but it was not till 1653 that Innocent condemned them. The Papal bull was accepted by Anne of Austria and Mazarin, by the Bishops and the Sorbonne; Port Royal and the Jansenists seemed on the verge of destruction, when they were saved by the Provincial Letters.

In spite of the hostility of Louis XIV., repeatedly manifested, the Jansenists were destined to survive his reign, though Port Royal fell before its close. The imprudence and disputatious humour of the Jansenists brought their doctrines again into question in 1702. The King's antipathy to them was increased by some papers seized at Brussels in the house of their chief, Father Quesnel; from which it appeared that they had formerly purchased the Isle of Nordstrand, on the coast of Holstein, to form an asylum for their sect; and also that they had endeavoured to get themselves comprised in the truce of Ratisbon in 1684, under the name of the "Disciples of St. Augustine," as if they formed a political body like Lutherans or Calvinists. Louis, in his own name, and in that of Philip V., now besought Pope Clement XI. to renew against the Jansenists the constitutions of his predecessors. Clement complied by a bull, which was accepted by the French clergy, in spite of the opposition of Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris (1705). To revenge themselves on Noailles, the Jesuits obtained from Clement a condemnation of Quesnel's Moral Reflections on the New Testament; a book of much repute, which had been published under the superintendence of the Cardinal, and which Clement himself is said to have praised. A ruder stroke was the suppression of the Abbey of Port Royal. The nuns had refused to accept the Papal bull of 1705. Le Tellier, who had succeeded Père La Chaise as the King's confessor, resorted to violent measures, and the Cardinal de Noailles, to clear himself from the suspicion of being a Jansenist, gave his sanction to them. In November, 1709, the nuns of Port Royal were dragged from their abode and dispersed in various convents; and the famous abbey itself, consecrated by the memory of so much virtue, piety, and talent, was razed to its foundations.

Although the Cardinal de Noailles had taken part in the persecution of the Port Royalists, he refused to retract the approbation which he had given to Quesnel's book. Louis's Jesuit confessor, Le Tellier, instigated several bishops to denounce him to the King as an introducer of new doctrines; the book was prohibited by the

CHAP. XLII.]

BULL UNIGENITUS-THE QUIETISTS.

37

Royal Council; and Pope Clement XI. was requested to give it a fresh condemnation in a form which might be received in France. After waiting nearly two years, Clement replied by promulgating the famous Bull UNIGENITUS (September 8th, 1713). Instead of the general terms of the former bull, the present instrument expressly condemned 101 propositions extracted from the Réflexions Morales. Many of these breathe the spirit of true Christianity, and might be found in the writings of St. Augustine and even of St. Paul. Noailles and a few other prelates protested against the bull; but the King compelled the Parliament to register it, and the Sorbonne and other universities to receive it, the principal opponents of it being sent into exile. Nevertheless, the recusant bishops, who did not exceed fifteen in number, were supported by most of the principal religious orders, by the majority of the clergy, and by the opinion of the public, always adverse to the Jesuits. Le Tellier now endeavoured to obtain the deposition of Noailles from the Archbishopric of Paris; and he was saved from that degradation only by the death of Louis XIV. The disputes proceeded during the Regency. The Jansenists seemed to gather fresh strength, and talked of appealing against the bull to a future Council. To put an end to the contest, and to save the Parliament, threatened with dissolution by the Court for refusing to register a Royal Decree for the acceptance of the bull, Noailles at length agreed to subscribe to it, with certain modifications. The question, however, was by no means set at rest. It was again agitated in the pontificate of Benedict XIII., in 1725; and, in 1750, it produced a great public scandal and disturbance, as we shall have to relate in a subsequent chapter.

The Quietists, another Roman Catholic sect, was much less important than the Jansenists. Their mystical tenets—a sort of inward, quiet, contemplation of the Divine perfections, a worship of the heart-were too refined and transcendental to attract many foliowers. The founder of the sect in France was Madame Guyon, who gave her principles to the world in two works, entitled Le Moyen Court and Les Torrents. The talent and enthusiasm of Madame Guyon obtained for her an illustrious disciple in Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, the amiable and ingenious author of Tele- . machus. The sect had previously appeared in Italy, where the doctrines of Quietism had been propagated by a Spanish priest named Molinos. It had there been found, however-what is not unfrequently the case with exalted religious enthusiasm-that these mystical tenets had been productive of gross immorality among his

38

FREETHINKERS.

[CHAP. XLII. disciples, who imagined that, so long as the soul was wrapped up in God, the acts of the body were of little consequence; and, in 1687, Molinos had been condemned by the Inquisition at Rome to perpetual imprisonment. These circumstances at first threw a suspicion on the French Quietists, who, however, do not appear to have deserved the reproach of immorality. But their doctrines were approved neither by the orthodox clergy nor by the Jansenists. Bossuet, the illustrious Bishop of Meaux, was their most virulent opponent. He caused Madame Guyon to be imprisoned at Vincennes, entered into a violent controversy with Fénelon, and procured from Pope Innocent XII. a condemnation of that prelate's work, entitled Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Intérieure, in which he had explained and defended his principles. This affair, as well as the publication of Telemachus, entirely ruined Fénelon with Louis XIV. and Madame Maintenon, and deprived him of all his former influence.1

It is not our intention to describe the various religious sects which sprung up in England during this period, as the Independents, Quakers, Methodists, &c. As the Reformation had a tendency to produce sectarianism in men of enthusiastic temperaments, so, on the other hand, among those of cooler and more reasoning minds it was apt to beget scepticism and infidelity. The English School of Freethinkers took its rise in the seventeenth century with Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Tindal, Bolingbroke, and others; and hence was derived the French sceptical philosophy which produced the Revolution.

1 See Bausset, Vie de Fénelon, t. ii. and iii. (ed. 1817).

CHAP. XLIII.]

RISE OF ALBERONI.

39

THE

CHAPTER XLIII.

HE Peace of Utrecht had reconciled all the contending Powers in the War of the Spanish Succession, except the two Sovereigns principally concerned in the dispute. The questions at issue between Philip V. and Charles VI. still remained to be settled by future wars and negotiations. In the military and diplomatic transactions which ensued, Spain, directed by the will of a youthful and ambitious Queen, and the counsels of a subtle and enterprising Minister, seemed inspired with new vigour, and promised again to take a first rank in the affairs of Europe.

After the death of Philip V.'s first wife, Louisa of Savoy (February, 1714), a woman of courage and understanding above her sex, the Princess des Ursins, had assumed for a while the government of the King and Kingdom. But the uxorious temper of the melancholy, devout, and moral Philip, demanded another consort; and the Princess, too old herself to fill that post, though rumour gave her credit for aspiring to it, resolved to procure for him a Queen of a docile and pliant disposition, who would not contest with her the empire which she exercised over the King. With this view she consulted Alberoni, who now enjoyed a considerable share of the royal confidence and favour. This extraordinary man, the son of a working gardener, and a native of Piacenza, had been by turns a bell-ringer, an abbé, the steward of a bishop, the favourite and confidant of the Duke of Vendôme, and lastly, the agent of the Duke of Parma at Madrid. Alberoni, as if by accident, and after running over a great many names, recommended Elizabeth Farnese, the niece of his Sovereign, the reigning Duke of Parma, as the future Queen of Spain. She was, he said, a good Lombard girl, brought up on the butter and cheese of the country, and accustomed to hear of nothing in the little Court in which she had been educated but embroidery and needlework. The consent of Louis XIV. was obtained to the union, and, on September 16th, 1714, not much more than half a year after the death of Philip's first wife, his nuptials with the Parmesan Princess were celebrated by proxy at Parma.