their respect for
law, were manifested even amidst persecution; the children were torn away
from Protestant families, and the chapels were demolished by act of
Parliament; the soldiery were less violent than elsewhere, but the
magistrates were more inveterate. "God has not judged us unworthy to
suffer ignominy for His name," said the ministers condemned by the
Parliament for having performed the offices of their ministry. "The king
has taken no cognizance of the case," exclaimed one of the accused,
Legendre, pastor of Rouen; "he has relied upon the judges; it is not his
Majesty who shall give account before God; you shall be responsible, and
you alone; you who, convinced as you are of our innocence, have
nevertheless condemned us and branded us." "The Parliament of Normandy
has just broken the ties which held us bound to our churches," said Peter
du Bosq. The banished ministers took the road to Holland. The seaboard
provinces were beginning to be dispeopled. A momentary disturbance,
which led to belief in a rising of the Reformers in the Cevennes and the
Vivarais, served as pretext for redoubled rigor. Dauphiny and Languedoc
were given up to the soldiery; murder was no longer forbidden them, it
was merely punishing rebels; several pastors were sentenced to death;
Homel, minister of Soyon in the Vivarais, seventy-five years of age, was
broken alive on the wheel. Abjurations multiplied through terror.
"There have been sixty thousand conversions in the jurisdiction of
Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in that of Montauban," wrote Louvois to his
father in the first part of September, 1685; "the rapidity with which
this goes on is such, that, before the end of the month, there will not
remain ten thousand religionists in the district of Bordeaux, in which
there were a hundred and fifty thousand on the 15th of last month." "The
towns of Nimes, Alais, Uzes, Villeneuve, and some others, are entirely
converted," writes the Duke of Noailles to Louvois in the month of
October, 1685; "those of most note in Nimes made abjuration in church the
day after our arrival. There was then a lukewarmness; but matters were
put in good train again by means of some billets that I had put into the
houses of the most obstinate. I am making arrangements for going and
scouring the Uvennes with the seven companies of Barbezieux, and my head
shall answer for it that before the 25th of November not a Huguenot shall
be left there."

And a few day