burned alive
for open heresy, or for having refused to communicate according to the
rites of the Catholic church, or go to mass, or for having hawked about
forbidden books. Finally, in December, the five councillors of the
Parliament of Paris, whom, six months previously, Henry II. had ordered
to be arrested and shut up in the Bastille, were dragged from prison and
brought to trial. The chief of them, Anne Dubourg, nephew of Anthony
Dubourg, Chancellor of France under Francis I., defended himself with
pious and patriotic persistency, being determined to exhaust all points
of law and all the chances of justice he could hope for without betraying
his faith. Everything shows that he had nothing to hope for from his
judges; one of them, the President Minard, as he was returning from the
palace on the evening of December 12, 1559, was killed by a pistol-shot;
the assassin could not be discovered; but the crime, naturally ascribed
to some friend of Dubourg, served only to make certain and to hasten the
death of the prisoner on trial. Dubourg was condemned on the 22d of
December, and heard unmoved the reading of his sentence. "I forgive my
judges," said he; "they have judged according to their own lights, not
according to the light that comes from on high. Put out your fires, ye
senators; be converted, and live happily. Think without ceasing of God
and on God." After these words, which were taken down by the clerk of
the court, "and which I have here copied," says De Thou, Dubourg was
taken on the 23d of December, in a tumbrel to the Place de Greve. As he
mounted the ladder he was heard repeating several times, "Forsake me not,
my God, for fear lest I forsake thee." He was strangled before he was
cast into the flames (De Thou, t. iii. pp. 399-402), the sole favor his
friends could obtain for him.

But extreme severity on the part of the powers that be is effectual only
when it falls upon a country or upon parties that are effete with age, or
already vanquished and worn out by long struggles; when, on the contrary,
it is brought to bear upon parties in the flush of youth, eager to
proclaim and propagate themselves, so far from intimidating them, it
animates them, and thrusts them into the arena into which they were of
themselves quite eager to enter. As soon as the rule of the Catholic,
in the persons and by the actions of the Guises, became sovereign and
aggressive, the threatened Reformers put themselves into the a